'I Was Just Waiting To Die': Survivors Correct The Record On Jonestown Massacre

On a remote airstrip in the South American country of Guyana, Jackie Speier lay gravely wounded behind the wheel of a small plane. The 28-year-old legal adviser to a California congressman had been shot five times. Near her lay the bullet-riddled bodies of her boss, Rep. Leo Ryan, three journalists and a woman fleeing a cult commune known as Jonestown.

When help finally came, Speier and other survivors learned the almost incomprehensible truth about what they had left behind. Six miles away, more than 900 bodies lay decomposing in the heat. One third of them were children. They were surrounded by syringes and toppled paper cups containing poison-laced punch.

According to a massive research project sponsored by San Diego State University, 918 people died on Nov. 18, 1978, in what came to be known as the Jonestown Massacre, the subject of the riveting new docuseries, “Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown.”

The three-part series, which premiered Monday on Hulu (and will air on National Geographic on Aug. 14), is deeply unsettling. It stands out from other documentaries about Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones by disputing the all-too-pervasive narrative that the victims were complicit in their deaths and by providing important context for the massacre. Modern-day interviews — including survivors like Speier, members of the Peoples Temple who escaped, U.S. military personnel tasked with counting and removing the bodies, and Jim Jones’ son himself — contextualize the harrowing video, photos and audio, much of it previously unaired.

Even Speier, who years later was elected to Ryan’s former seat in Congress, had not seen some of the footage before she watched the docuseries.

“It was almost like an out-of-body experience —