It all started out seemingly well. A man named Jim Jones formed a church with progressive ideas of desegregation, helping the homeless and lifting up your fellow man. He called it The Peoples Temple. Membership would reach into the thousands. But when Peoples Temple started receiving criticism from people who left the church, Jim Jones fled to Guyana with church members and formed a settlement. They named it after their leader: Jonestown. In Jonestown, what began as a religious movement and commune disintegrated into paranoia, abuse, murder and what would shockingly become the largest mass killing of American citizens until the September 11 attacks.
