No one spoke of the children’s future. Would they attend college? Would they spread the socialist word? Jones, at various points, weighed moving Jonestown to the Soviet Union, which Leslie thought was a strange choice for a predominantly African American congregation that was already beset by hunger and harsh weather.273 Or as she put it to me at the bar: “A bunch of black folks in Russia? Really?”

Anyone who complained about Jonestown, however, was swiftly and severely punished by Jones. After “the overwhelming realization that you have made one of the biggest mistakes of your life,” Leslie explained, “you then have to hide that and whisper about it [to] someone you thought you could trust. That kind of stress is almost unbearable.”

When Leslie wrote a letter to a close friend confessing her desire to leave, Jones discovered it. Leslie was reprimanded and sentenced to a “learning crew,” which performed the most difficult manual labor and were kept isolated from their families and children.

Around this time, she learned that a friend, Shanda James, had been raped274 by Jones, then medicated to the point of oblivion. Leslie began to grow seriously worried about what lay ahead for her and her son. During our interview, recalling this time, she sounded not so different from the moral nonconformists in the Milgram studies. “What I was experiencing was not right,” she said. “It wasn’t true, it wasn’t honorable.”

She prayed that it would be her final year in Jonestown.

Leslie is the kind of person—perhaps surprisingly so, for a former cult member—who follows her gut, analyzes situations carefully, and sticks firmly to her decisions. Those traits are what brought her to Jonestown. They would also be what got her out.

She began dropping hints to a friend, Diane Louie, that she was ready to leave. Diane invited her to join a group that was planning an escape on the day of Congressman Ryan’s visit, when it was thought that everyone would be too distracted to notice a few missing people.

Leslie could not risk bringing her family members, who by then had also moved to Jonestown. Not knowing what was about to happen, Leslie thought she could return and rescue her family once she, herself, was free. The morning of the escape, she was only narrowly able to wrest three-year-old Jakari away from his father, who was by then one of Jones’s closest aides.

Sixteen months after she arrived in Jonestown, Leslie and nine others slipped past the guard shack and set out for Matthews Ridge, a hetown nearly thirty miles away from Jonestown. As Leslie walked through the jungle with Jakari strapped to her back, her only fear was getting caught. When the group arrived at a police station in Matthews Ridge, the police captain told Leslie there were hundreds dead in Jonestown. Later, Leslie would find out the casualties included her sister, brother, mother, and Jakari’s father, Joe.