Twenty-five years ago today, Jim Jones and 912 members of his Peoples Temple performed a ritual of murder and suicide in a jungle village in the South American nation of Guyana.
The anniversary of the worst mass murders and suicides in modern American history will be marked with a ceremony today beside the mass grave in Oakland, Calif., where hundreds of the victims are buried.
But it will go largely unnoticed here in New Jersey, even though by an accident of geography and a twist of fate, the remains of the infamous Jones were cremated at a cemetery in Gloucester County and scattered over the Atlantic Ocean.
Jonestown was supposed to be a tropical, communal paradise, a respite in the Guyanan jungle from the intense scrutiny the Peoples Temple had come under in San Francisco, the city where the movement was headquartered.
But word filtered home from relatives, defectors and the news media about the deep troubles in Jones's paradise. Jonestown was run like a veritable prison camp. People weren't allowed to leave, and they were subjected to beatings, forced sex and other abusive practices. Jones, the revered founder, was showing increasing signs of paranoia and mental instability.
The chain of events that ended with the mass suicide and murder was set in motion by a visit from a California congressman, Leo Ryan.
Ryan led a delegation to Jonestown in November 1978 to investigate the many allegations against Jones and the Peoples Temple. During his stay, several Jonestown residents asked if they could return home with the delegation. On the 18th, when they arrived at an airstrip for the flight out, they were ambushed by gunmen from the Peoples Temple. Ryan, three newsmen and a temple defector were killed.
Back at Jonestown the same day, Jones assembled his followers for the murder-suicide ritual they had rehearsed many times. There was a vat of fruit punch laced with cyanide. Adults were given syringes to administer the poison to children and cups to drink it themselves.
"Please get us some medication," Jones was heard to say on one of the tapes investigators found at the scene. "It's simple. It's simple. There's no convulsions with it. It's just simple."
At first, the U.S. planned to bury the hundreds of bodies in a mass grave on site, but the government of Guyana rejected that idea. Instead, the bodies were loaded onto cargo planes and flown to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The first ones arrived Nov. 23.
But Delaware wanted no part in the legacy of the Peoples Temple, and its legislature quickly passed a measure that prevented local funeral directors from cremating or burying the remains of Jonestown victims in the state, said William Torbert, the Dover funeral director who handled Jones' remains.
"People in Delaware expressed concern that their state would become a cult shrine, that people would come to Delaware to pay homage to Jim Jones or the victims of Peoples Temple," said Rebecca Moore, a professor of religion at San Diego State University and the sister of two women who died at Jonestown.
"I think there was fear about the relatives of the victims, too -- about what kind of crazy people these were and how it might redound to Delaware if their relatives were buried there," she said.
So the local funeral directors were forced to travel to facilities in neighboring states to cremate the remains of the victims, Torbert said.
The cremation of Jones took place without fanfare on Jan. 19, 1979, at the Eglington Cemetery in Clarksboro, N.J.
None of Jones's relatives was present.
"The lot holders are adamant. They're asking, 'Are you going to bury him here?'" George Smith, then cemetery president, told an Associated Press reporter at the time.
In fact, none of the Jonestown victims cremated at Eglington was buried in the cemetery, said Jesse Pebley, the current president.
Pebley said the small role Eglington played was a simple matter of geographic convenience. It is located just across the Delaware Memorial Bridge, within easy reach of Dover.
"The funeral directors felt from an elapsed-time point-of-view, Eglington was the most efficient way for them to get to a crematory," he said.
Jones and 28 others were cremated at Eglington before the Delaware funeral directors found themselves in hot water with the New Jersey Board of Mortuary Science for doing business here without being licensed.
After issuing a censure, the board changed its regulations to allow Delaware undertakers to bypass the rule they had been accused of violating. Despite the new leniency, Pebley said he doesn't believe any other Jonestown cremations were performed at Eglington.
Most of the 29 who were cremated in New Jersey were shipped back to their next of kin, Torbert said. But Jones' family had difficulty finding a place to bury him, so they asked Torbert to scatter the ashes at sea.
On a cold day in March 1979, he did just that, he said.
He made arrangements with a pilot friend to fly from a community airport five miles north of Dover.
"Usually, when someone asks to have their remains scattered in the ocean, we just go down to the beach," Torbert said. "But we wanted this one to be far out over the water."
Once they were far enough, Torbert and a man who worked for him opened the door of the airplane and spilled the contents of the box into the wind.