I Covered San Francisco’s Bloody November of ’78

After the Murder of My Colleague and the Mayor’s Assassination, I Kept Writing

I awoke before dawn on November 19, 1978, nearly 900 miles away from the city desk of the San Francisco Examiner, where I worked. As I stepped from the shower, I grabbed the Tucson Sunday paper and saw the front-page news about a massacre in Guyana, where two of my co-workers were on assignment. The story couldn’t have been less clear about which one of them had been shot to death on a jungle airstrip by henchmen of the Reverend Jim Jones, the charismatic and paranoid leader of the Peoples …