History’s Most Famous Psychopaths: Jim Jones
Bettmann/Getty ImagesJim Jones, preaching to his followers.
Though the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” is used a little bit as a joke today, to poke fun at someone who’s buying into a scam or a group mentality, the origins of the phrase are quite sinister. In 1978 in Guyana, 900 people – 300 of them children – drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and died at the behest of their cult leader: Jim Jones.
Until September 11th, the Jonestown Massacre as it came to be known, was considered the single largest deliberate loss of American civilian life in history.
Jones had started his Jonestown Colony in Guyana as a place for his Peoples Temple cult to escape what he perceived to be the stresses of modern American life.
David Hume Kennerly/Getty ImagesAn aerial view of the aftermath of the massacre.
Often strung out on various drugs, Jones brought his isolated followers to his colony, where he continuously told them he could help them while teaching them to fear the outside world.
However, the Peoples Temple started falling when members from the U.S. government traveled to Guyana to help bring members of the cult home. Jones had instilled so much fear in his followers that they believed the government officials were there to bring them to concentration camps, or kill them. Scared they would die as captives in the United States, they rallied together around Jones for support.
Rather than helping them, he killed them all, lacing large batches of an off-brand Kool-Aid with cyanide, and encouraging them to feed it to their children and take it themselves.
That same day, he killed himself with a gunshot to the head.
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