Jonestown, in the end, was more mass murder than mass suicide. The children were poisoned first, sapping the parents of their will to live. Guards trained guns and crossbows on those who resisted drinking the poison.275 Ultimately, 907276 people drank the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. (It was more economical than Kool-Aid, and Jonestown at that point was cash-strapped.) Sixteen attempted to defect with Congressman Ryan, whose entourage was fired on by Temple gunmen, killing Ryan and four others. Three men at Jonestown consciously did not drink the poison, and one woman hid. Just thirty-six people277 who woke up in Jonestown on November 18, 1978, lived to see the next day.

From Leslie’s vantage, there are a number of reasons why so many people came to Jonestown, and why they didn’t leave as soon as its horrible reality became clear. The Jonestown settlers may have been brainwashed, but they were also functionally imprisoned. Many of the Temple members had signed blank pieces of paper that could be filled out with fake crimes and used for blackmail. Subsisting on rice and gravy, they were too malnourished to run fast or overpower guards. Those who complained were drugged with sedatives or physically beaten. Some were senior citizens who had sold their possessions before leaving America—they had nothing to return to. A few might have been true believers, but many were, Leslie said, “holding on to this little thread of hope that things would change.”

Leslie’s example does not, therefore, imply that others in Jonestown were too weak-willed or timid to escape. For instance, moments before the massacre, Christine Miller, a sixty-year-old woman, opposed Jones’s plan of mass suicide, telling him, “We all have a right to our own destiny as individuals.”278 Hyacinth Thrash, a seventy-six-year-old woman who survived by hiding under her bed during the poisoning, later wrote that she had “double feelings”279 about Jones and had devised an escape plan. Leslie’s salvation likely only came because she had long ago started to disbelieve Jones’s teachings, had committed herself morally to breaking from the group, and, crucially, had chanced upon the escape party. Countless others were not so lucky.

For years afterward, Leslie was wracked by survivor’s guilt and posttraumatic stress disorder. She hopped from boyfriend to boyfriend in an attempt to replace the family and friends she lost overnight. When we spoke, the son for whose sake she escaped, Jakari, was in prison for attempted murder. This is, she acknowledges, in part the result of a childhood spent in an unimaginably violent place. The children of Jonestown were physically and mentally tortured. They were trained to say that they would do anything—put their mother’s hand in a garbage disposal, cut off her breast—for the cause. They were groomed to be child soldiers, a second generation of miserable devotees.