Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple
Memoir
By: Deborah Layton
Date: 1998
Source: Layton, Deborah. Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple. New York: Anchor Books, 1998, 66–69, 91–92, 151, 299.
About the Author: Deborah Layton (1953–) was born in Utah. She joined Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in 1971 and served as the financial secretary. She moved to the group's Jonestown compound in Guyana, but the brutal conditions prompted her to flee in May 1978. She released an affidavit describing the conditions at Jonestown to alert American officials about the abuses. Convinced that the American government was going to destroy the Peoples Temple, Jones ordered his followers to commit mass suicide on November 18, 1978.
Introduction
Although thousands of Americans had experimented with collective living arrangements on communes in the 1960s as part of a...
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1970's Lifestyles and Social Trends Primary Sources
The 1970's: Primary Sources
