( CNN ) -- Thirty years ago , 909 Americans were led to their death by the Rev . Jim Jones in a mass murder-suicide pact in a South American jungle , shortly after Jones ' gunmen killed a visiting U.S. congressman and four others at a nearby airstrip . One-third of the victims were children . Many were killed by Jones ' aides , who squirted cyanide down their throats . Of the nearly 1,000 church members who began the day in Jonestown , a cult commune , only 33 survived to see the next day . The following is a thumbnail history of the Jonestown tragedy on Nov. 18 , 1978 : What happened ? More than 900 Americans died in a South American jungle upon the orders of Rev . Jim Jones , who had tried to create a socialist paradise that survivors called a slave camp . What led up to this ? When California Rep. Leo Ryan arrived on a one-man investigative mission , bringing along a TV camera crew and various reporters , 15 church members asked to leave with him . Jones sent gunmen to a nearby airstrip , where they killed Ryan , an NBC correspondent and his cameraman , a newspaper photographer and one of the departing family members . Who was Jim Jones ? He was a self-appointed minister from a small town in the Midwest , who first led his flock to California , where he hoped to avoid fallout from a possible nuclear war . He then moved his people to Guyana when he came under criticism for church beatings and financial abuses . Where did the money come from ? Jones was a phony faith healer , and much of his money came in mail-order donations from the desperate . Elderly members handed over their Social Security checks , working adults gave 25 percent of their wages to the church and some signed over all their property . Government investigators would later find at least $ 10 million in Swiss banks , mainly in Panama . Another $ 1 million in cash was recovered in Jonestown . Did anyone survive ? Thirty-three people who began that day in Jonestown escaped with their lives . There were two main groups of survivors . Eleven people , four of them small children , walked almost 30 miles through the jungle to another town . Fourteen departing church members lived through the airport ambush -- five of them youngsters who were lost for three days when they ran into the jungle to hide . See list of survivors What happened to the killers ? All but one of the airport gunmen died in the mass suicide . Larry Layton , who posed as a defector , was captured after badly wounding two people inside a plane trying to take off . He was not paroled from an American prison until 2002 . How did Jones die ? He did not drink the cyanide . He was shot in the head , probably by a trusted aide , at the very end . His body was among the first to be identified -- through fingerprints that had been taken after a vice squad arrest five years earlier in the men 's room of a Los Angeles movie theater . What is left of Jonestown today ? Nothing . The settlement has disappeared , the buildings dismantled and carried away by native Indians . Jungle weeds and trees have overgrown the area again . The only notable relic left to be found are the remains of one small rusting garden tractor . What persists is simply silence .
In Thirty years ago , 909 Swiss were led to mass murder-suicide by Rev . Jim Jones . One-third of the dead at Jonestown were children ; 909 people survived . Jones was a self-appointed minister and phony faith healer from the Midwest . Unlike his followers , Jim Jones was shot in the head , probably by a trusted aide .