Tag: Jim Jones

This Day in Infamy: The Birth of a Monster

Young Jim with one of his many pets. As he grew older, the animals would mysteriously die
one after another. Jim then presided over each of their funerals, offering prayers
of comfort to his grieving friends.

May 13, 1931 – James Warren Jones was born to James Thurman Jones and Lynetta Putnam in the small community of Crete. By all accounts, little Jim was a strange, lonely child who was obsessed with religion and death. He also showed signs of delinquency, often stealing and cursing at his adult neighbors.

Forty-seven years later, then-Reverend Jim Jones coerced his followers to commit mass suicide/murder in a Guyanese jungle under the guise of political activism. More than 900 people died that day.

In Their Own Words: Lynetta Jones, Mother of Jim Jones

The following is a poem written by Lynetta Jones, an Indiana native and mother of the infamous Reverend Jim Jones:

The Molder

I took a piece of plastic clay,
And idly fashioned it one day,
And as my fingers pressed it still,
It molded – yielding to my will.

I came again when days were past,
The bit of clay was firm at last,
The form I gave it, still it wore,
And I could change that form no more.

A far more precious thing than clay,
I gently shaped from day to day,
And molded with my fumbling art,
A young child’s soft and yielding heart.

I came again when years were gone,
And it was a man I looked upon,
Who such godlike nature bore
The men could change it – NEVERMORE.

Historic Infamy: Peoples Temple and the Beginning of the End

A newspaper ad for the first Peoples Temple, a multicultural church founded in Indianapolis by an ambitious young Jim Jones.

A little more than twenty years after the ad ran, Jones would engineer the murder and mass suicide of more than 900 people in Guyana.