Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate were supposed to be utopias. How did it go so wrong?

"That’s the anomaly,” Guinn says. “Unlike other demagogues, Jones got his followers by appealing to their better natures. He wasn’t telling them that they were superior to anybody else, that they have to destroy everybody else, that it’s their destiny to rule the world. He brought them in by saying, ‘Let’s make the world a fairer place, a better place, without regard to race, without regard to gender.’”

Dystopia and utopia are antonyms, or at least they’re supposed to be. One is an absolute nightmare, the other a perfect dream. In practice, like in Jonestown, the two extremes can thread together. In any given aspiring utopia — in its grand gambles, in its bold social experimentation — there is the seed for unspeakable calamity. Just like that, the dream can become the nightmare.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biographical details that emerged about Heaven’s Gate members in the months after the 1997 mass suicide pointed to lonely lives. “He felt he had a purpose,” one man’s sister said of her brother’s entrance into the cult: “He was part of a community.” A Heaven’s Gate member’s parent told the media that her estranged daughter once wrote her a letter saying “Mother, be happy that I’m happy.”

Anticipating a media frenzy after their suicides, members of the cult left behind videotaped testimonials. There’s nearly two hours of footage, all beatific smiles and self-awareness. “I just wanna let everyone know how lucky and happy I feel to be here,” a member who identifies herself as Yrsody says, “and to let you know that what we’re about to do is certainly nothing to” — she pauses — “think negatively about. We’re all choosing of our own free will to go to the next level with Ti and Do.”

“There are people in the world who thought I had completely lost my marbles,” scoffs a member identified as Wknody. “They’re not right! I couldn’t have made a better choice.”

Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate were supposed to be utopias. How did it go so wrong?

3 decades later, remains of Jonestown bodies found - The Washington Post

More than 35 years after the infamous suicide-murder of some 900 people — many forced to drink a cyanide-laced grape punch — in Jonestown, Guyana, the cremated remains of nine of the victims were found in a dilapidated former funeral home in Delaware, officials said Thursday.

The discovery brought back memories of a tragedy that killed hundreds of children and a U.S. congressman and horrified Americans.

The remains were clearly marked, with the names of the deceased and place of their death included on accompanying death certificates, authorities said. Kimberly Chandler, spokeswoman for the Delaware Division of Forensic Science, declined to release the names of the nine people to The Associated Press. She said officials were working to notify relatives.

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After the deaths, bodies of 911 people who died in the massacre were brought to Dover Air Force Base, home to the U.S. military’s largest mortuary. Many of the bodies were decomposed and could not be identified. Several cemeteries refused to take them until the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, stepped forward in 1979 and accepted 409 bodies.

The remaining victims were cremated or buried in family cemeteries.

Dover funeral director William Torbert Sr., 79, said the Air Force asked five or six local funeral homes to help process the remains.

It’s not unusual for families to authorize cremation and then leave the ashes unclaimed at funeral homes, said Torbert and other Delaware funeral directors.

3 decades later, remains of Jonestown bodies found - The Washington Post