Even before Jones departed for Jonestown, Leslie had started to pull away from the church, finding a series of jobs that conveniently interfered with the Temple gatherings.

But the Peoples Temple was very efficient at breaking its members’ egos. At so-called “catharsis” sessions, family members would be called to inform on family members, accusing them of capitalist decadence and stripping them of their self-worth. Gradually, Leslie’s self-esteem disintegrated. She married a fellow Temple member named Joe Wilson. But after she and Joe had a son, Jakari, the couple drifted apart, and Leslie allowed Joe and a friend to take Jakari to Jonestown. “I thought he was better off without me,” she explained. “I felt like I was not a good socialist.”

She had no intention of ever following them to Jonestown. But in 1977, she received a phone call from a Temple member who informed her it was her time to go. Leslie feared that if she didn’t move to Jonestown right away, she would never see her son again. That prospect terrified her enough to board a bus to Miami, then a plane to Guyana. From Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, she took the twenty-four-hour boat trip to the settlement. Upon arrival, her passport, like those of the other Jonestown members, was seized.

When Leslie first arrived in Jonestown, she was happy to be forgiven and welcomed back into the fold. She was impressed with the settlement in those early days, before an influx of nearly a thousand newcomers would strain its capacity. Jakari laughed and played with the other children like they were brothers and sisters. The church members had cleared the jungle and built cottages and cabins. She was surprised to see armed guards, but she believed what she was told, which is that they were there to protect the settlers from dangerous local villagers.

Very soon, the image of a tropical socialist paradise began to fade. Rations grew more meager as more and more Temple members arrived by the boatload. Residents’ legs were ravaged by ulcers from the heat. Leslie was told she would be sent to Cuba to train to be a doctor—a career path that excited her. But then she was randomly reassigned to cover a white woman’s fieldwork job. The explanation, from the supposedly antiracist Temple, was that the white woman would burn in the sun. To Leslie, it was a galling sign of a racial disparity at Jonestown.

Jones had a habit of rounding up his acolytes in the middle of the night and forcing them to prepare for an attack he said could come at any moment. If that occurred, he told them, it would be time for “revolutionary suicide.”