Jim Jones
| Jim Jones | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
James Warren Jones May 13, 1931 Crete, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | November 18, 1978 (aged 47) Jonestown, Guyana |
| Cause of death | Gunshot wound to the head. |
| Occupation | Cult leader |
| Spouse(s) | Marceline Baldwin Jones (m. 1949; d. 1978) |
| Children | 7 |
James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader. Ordained as a Disciples of Christ pastor, Jones founded and led the Peoples Temple; he gained infamy due to the November, 1978 mass murder-suicide of 918 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, and the ordering of four additional Temple member deaths in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. Nearly three hundred children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning. Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head; it is suspected his death was a suicide.
Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.
Jones was born in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (1887–1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902–1977). Lynetta reportedly believed she had given birth to a messiah. He was of Irish and Welsh descent. Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to Lynn, Indiana, in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.
Jones was a voracious reader as a child and studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully, noting the strengths and weaknesses of each. Jones also developed an intense interest in religion, primarily because he found making friends difficult. Childhood acquaintances later recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death". They alleged that he frequently held funerals for small animals on his parents' property and had stabbed a cat to death.
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