A woman who lost 27 family members in the 1978 Jonestown Massacre has sued an Oakland cemetery association and its top officers, claiming that after she spent 18 years raising money to build a monument to the victims, the cemetery pulled a switch and decided to erect a different monument, based on a design from Jones’ People’s Church, which “proposes to include the name of Jim Jones himself as a victim of the Jonestown Massacre-Suicides.”

Jynona Norwood says the defendants misappropriated the money she raised for the memorial and “defrauded plaintiffs of the use of a sacred site which plaintiffs have used for years to honor the victims of the Jonestown Massacre-Suicides.”

At the 32nd annual Jonestown memorial, held at an Evergreen Cemetery mass grave for Peoples Temple victims, a schism among mourners led to competing ceremonies – one led by a woman who lost 27 family members in the mass suicide in Guyana, the other by Jim Jones Jr.

Today in 1978: A total of 912 people die in Jonestown, Guyana, after People’s Temple cult leader Jim Jones convinces most followers to kill themselves by drinking cyanide-laced punch. Others are shot to death or forcibly poisoned.

While reading an exposé about San Francisco preacher and cult leader Jim Jones in 1977, Ken White was surprised to see mention of Michael Prokes, an old friend who had become a spokesperson for Jones.

Prokes killed himself a few months after the mass murder/suicide took place at the cult’s compound. White has now turned his friend’s story into a play.

It has taken more than 30 years, but the government of Guyana has erected a memorial plaque at the site of the Jonestown cult massacre, a dark episode the South American country had long sought to downplay.

A simple, white stone plaque was unveiled with little fanfare Wednesday at the jungle clearing where more than 900 members of the cult led by the American preacher Jim Jones died in a night of mass murder and suicide on Nov. 18, 1978.

30 years ago more than 900 men, women and children were massacred in a murder-suicide ritual thought up by cult leader Jim Jones.

On Nov. 18, 1978, members of the Jonestown security unit shot and killed congressman Leo Ryan, three journalists and one defector as they attempted to leave an airstrip near the settlement on two planes. The gunmen injured 10 other people, including Speier, who sustained five gunshot wounds.

By the time the airstrip gunmen returned to Jonestown, Jones had gathered his people in the pavilion and had begun preparing them for the end. He used news of Ryan’s shooting to convince the throng that they had no hope, no future, no place to go. “The congressman has been murdered!” he said. “Please get the medication before it’s too late. Don’t be afraid to die.”

Cyanide was being bought and shipped to the Rev. Jim Jones’ jungle compound in South America for at least two years before 900 Americans died there at the command of their cult leader, CNN has learned.

Jones led his followers to their death after his gunmen killed a visiting congressman, Rep. Leo Ryan, and four others, including an NBC News correspondent and his cameraman, on November 18, 1978.