Twenty years ago this month, Tim Stoen was holed up in hell.
He and his wife had gone to Guyana with U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan in one last attempt to retrieve their son, who had been claimed by cult leader Jim Jones as his own.Waiting in Georgetown, their hope died as they heard that Ryan and four others had been shot to death in an ambush at the Jones-town airstrip.
They knew it was only a matter of time before Jones followed through with his long-threatened mass murder-suicide.
"It was really a horrific night . . . knowing at any moment that our son was going to be dead. It was utterly hopeless, Stoen says.
More than 900 people died after Jones ordered followers to drink cyanide-poisoned punch. Nearly one-third were children. Among them - John Victor Stoen, age 6.
"The lesson for me is that every group . . . has to make sure that they hold their leader to a set of standards, constantly hold that leader accountable," Stoen says.
Stoen, a former San Francisco prosecutor, had represented Jones in California and became a trusted member of the Peoples Temple.
Now in private practice in Colorado, Stoen remembers letting his enthusiasm over the good things, like seeing hard-core heroin addicts go straight, overwhelm his misgivings about the bad - corporal punishment and thought control.
"I said, `Look how altruistic, how socialistic the people are becoming. Yes, Jones is heavy-handed and he's idiosyncratic, but it's working.' "
Jynona Norwood was hiding in a San Francisco suburb 20 years ago. She had gone there with her young son, Ed, afraid Jones would sweep him off to Jonestown.
Her lesson from Jonestown: Beware of false prophets.
"I never believed that Jim . . . was a minister from his heart," Norwood says. She was one of the few in her family to resist Jones' charm. Twenty-seven of her relatives, including her mother, died in Jonestown.
She believes that Jones, son of a Klansman but adopted father of a rainbow family, used interracial tolerance as a powerful recruiting tool for the poor blacks and privileged whites who flocked to his services.
"He knew that was the door into black folks' hearts and idealistic, altruistic white people who wanted to see the end of racism."
Norwood, now a Los Angeles pastor, helps organize yearly memorial services at the mass grave in Oakland where about 400 Jonestown victims are buried.
She is trying to raise funds for a wall to memorialize the dead and warn the living.
"They deserve to be remembered," she says. "They were our neighbors. They were our loved ones. They were our friends."