What it was like to be first on the scene after the Jonestown massacre

By November 1978, U.S. Air Force Special Operations sergeant David Netterville had served for nearly seven years and had completed a tour in Vietnam. But nothing could’ve prepared him for what he saw in Jonestown, a commune led by Jim Jones in the forests of Guyana.

“It was unprecedented,” says Netterville, who gave his first ever broadcast interview for the National Geographic docuseries Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown. “I was just totally shocked at the number of bodies that were laying on the ground.”

(Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown will premiere June 17 on Hulu and August 14 on National Geographic)

The victims had been members of Peoples Temple, a religious movement Jones founded in the United States. In the 1970s, Jones had led them from California to Guyana, where they built Jonestown. Jones promised it would become a utopia. Instead, Jones gave them death. 

Arriving at Jonestown on November 20, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause did not immediately register the mass of colors on the ground below as an unfathomable number of human bodies. “It just looked like confetti that had been thrown around it,” he says. “But each of those pieces of confetti was the shirt or dress or something of a dead person.” 

Just two days before, on November 18, 1978, Jones compelled many in his congregation to consume a cyanide cocktail and end their lives. Though he had trained the community to prepare for their deaths, there is evidence that some people may have been forced to consume the poison unwillingly or had it injected into them. 

Many fathers, mothers, children, teachers, and nurses remained where they had fallen. For the first responders who arrived days after the massacre, it was a scene they would never forget. 

Counting the dead 

Since Jonestown’s population was primarily Americans, officials called in the U.S. military to gather information. Netterville and his team did not know what happened there—only that Congressman Leo Ryan had been gunned down near the commune.

Both Netterville and Krause remember the same thing about approaching the site: the unmistakable, horrific smell of death. The scent even invaded the helicopters high above. As Netterville explains, “A human body is the worst smell you can ever smell. Multiply a dead cow times ten.” To mask the odor as much as possible, he eventually fashioned a mask by “cut[ting] a bandana out of a pillowcase and put[ting] Old Spice lotion on it.”

The bodies, already attracting bugs, were decomposing in the heat and humidity. “The bodies were so bloated that […] it was very hard to distinguish who they were,” says Krause, who was one of the first journalists to arrive at Jonestown after the massacre.

The scene was made even more horrific when the first responders noticed the children, who ranged in age from babies to teenagers. Netterville recalls, “Some of the people that died were actually holding onto their children.”

Animals weren’t spared: Netterville remembers seeing the bodies of murdered dogs. Someone had even taken the time to shoot Mr. Muggs, a chimpanzee that came with Peoples Temple from California. “I just could not believe it. Why would you kill the animals?”

Netterville remembers his team divided the land into sections and started counting corpses, one after the other. They initially calculated 450 bodies. When they radioed headquarters with the tally, Netterville remembers “they didn’t want to believe us… They had us repeat that number three times.”

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Lincoln was killed before their eyes. Then their own horror began.

As horrific as that number was, it turned out to be a massive undercount. “We didn’t know there were people underneath. They were laying on top of each other,” Netterville recalls.

With each new discovery, the death toll of the November massacre climbed higher and higher. The final total was 918 souls, 909 of whom died on site.

Jonestown, frozen in time

Now a ghost town, Jonestown eerily exhibited remnants of the commune’s final, chaotic hours––paper cups strewn across the ground, syringes scattered on tables, people holding onto each other as death came for them.

A 55-gallon drum was found containing a purplish concoction––a cocktail of cyanide, sedatives, and Flavor-Aid. Netterville remembers military personnel dumped it out on the ground. 

Jim Jones’s cabin acted as a window into how he ran the Peoples Temple.  “He had several pictures there of his family,” Netterville says. He had leveraged his interracial family to manipulate the press and members of the congregation while he tried to dodge allegations of abuse within the community.

Netterville used a crowbar he found to pry open a large safe in Jones’s house. “It was full of social security checks” from the senior residents who contributed their monthly payments to the commune, he remembers. It also included “boxes of passports. [Jones] took the passports so that people could not leave.”

Some had managed to escape death in those final hours, however. Odell Rhodes had seen the early stages of the massacre before hiding and fleeing to a nearby village. Hyacinth Thrash was asleep in her bed when the killings started, and so she survived.

Tim Carter, another survivor, was tasked with a special mission just as the killings began on November 18. One of Jones’s mistresses asked him to take suitcases of money to the embassy of the Soviet Union in Georgetown.

The assignment enabled Carter to walk out of Jonestown alive––but not before seeing his wife and baby die. “After that, I was beyond even thinking. All I heard in my brain is, ‘You cannot die, you cannot die, you cannot die, you must live, you must live, you must live.’”

The ones who didn’t survive left Jonestown in body bags. Some were claimed by their family and privately buried. The remaining 409 were interred in a mass grave in Oakland, California.

Though the work of first responders was over, the act of witnessing Jonestown’s horror left its mark. After using Old Spice to mask the stench of death, the scent still haunts Netterville. “I don’t use [Old Spice] anymore. I can’t stand the smell of it ever again.”