Deborah Layton joined Peoples Temple as a teenager. She left Jonestown six months before the suicides. In the PBS film Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple she expresses her unhappiness with the world in the 1960s and 1970s and the desire to change it, noting Marvin Gaye's song "Mercy, Mercy Me" off the 1971 album What's Going On. YouTube video embedded above, and here's the link.
"...the whole time I was in college, I would go into the library -- they had headsets-- I'd ask them to put that entire tape on (What's Going On). And it was all about "What is going on here, people," you know? The war in Vietnam, everyone's upset. And that sort of drifted into every aspect of my life...You know, we all seem to be lost here and that maybe it is time to get involved in something..." Deborah Layton; Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2007)
November 18th, 1978
Jonestown Massacre
Jim Jones issues a suicide order commanding his followers to drink cyanide-laced Fla-Vor-Aid. 918 people died in Guyana: five at the Port Kaituma airstrip, four in Georgetown and 909 men, women and children in Jonestown.
Gordon Lightfoot is born. He releases Don Quixote in 1972, one year after What's Going On. Listen to "Beautiful" above or here.
60% of participants polled believe the deaths of the adults at Jonestown were murders. View the poll here.