Jonestown mass murder-suicide scene in 1978

In this story:

• Pipe dreams
• Looking for answers
• Time to declassify?

OAKLAND, California (CNN) -- Twenty years ago, more than 900 people drank from a vat of cyanide-laced punch at a jungle settlement and died in a mass suicide that stunned the world.

On Wednesday, the people who went to Jonestown in the hope of starting a new society were remembered not just for the way their lives ended on November 18, 1978.

On a quiet hillside, relatives of the dead, as well as a few people who escaped the Jonestown Massacre, met at a mass grave for many of the cult victims and remembered how they lived.

"The people of Jonestown went to Guyana to live, not to die," said Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 relatives.

Norwood recalled members of her family being inspired by messages of racial harmony and social justice preached by Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones. Then, when stories of beatings and forced donations surfaced in the press, Jones moved his church from San Francisco to the jungle.

"All my mother kept saying is, 'You're going to love it over there," she recalled. "You're going to want to bring your son because this is going to be a better place. We will build a better world.' They believed that."

At first, the utopian vision of Jones' followers survived.

"The people in Jonestown had a vision, had a dream," Leslie Wilson said.

But Wilson and eight others escaped Jonestown hours before the suicides by pretending to go on a picnic. Richard Clark organized the picnic because he said he had lost faith in Jones.

"I escaped ... because I didn't go over there to die," he said. The suicide was preceded by a visit from U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, who had arrived in Jonestown to investigate complaints from relatives that people were being held there against their will.

Some left with Ryan, but they were ambushed at a small airstrip. The congressman and four others were killed.

Jones, knowing the deaths spelled doom for himself and his settlement, told his followers that night, "To die in revolutionary suicide is to live forever."

They started with the babies, squirting the poison into their mouths with syringes. Then the adults drank. Some protested. A few were able to escape into the jungle. Some were shot to death by the armed guards ringing the camp.

One of the survivors was Jones' son, Stephan, who was away with the camp basketball team at the time of the suicide order. He recently returned to Jonestown, now virtually obliterated by time.

"I came out of there reminded that those people had always been with me," he said. "I believe that a piece of them is with me, that I carry a piece of their souls, as does everyone here."

Standing behind him, two young people held up a banner. On it were the words that had been written on a sign that hung in the Jonestown pavilion: "THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT."

But questions still linger: How and why did the 913 people die?

Some believe answers may lie in more than 5,000 pages of information the U.S. government has kept secret.

"Twenty years later, it would be nice to know what went down," said J. Gordon Melton, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion.

Over the years, there have been rumors of CIA involvement. Some people believe CIA agents were posing as members of the Peoples Temple cult to gather information; others suggest the agency was conducting a mind-control experiment.

In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined that the CIA had no advance knowledge of the mass murder-suicide. The year before, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had concluded that cult leader Jim Jones "suffered extreme paranoia."

The committee -- now known as international relations -- released a 782-page report, but kept more than 5,000 other pages secret.

Without those documents, it's hard to confirm or refute the speculations that have sprung up around Jonestown, said Melton.

George Berdes, chief consultant to the committee at the time of the investigation, told the San Francisco Chronicle the papers were classified to assure sources' confidentiality, but he thinks it is time to declassify them.

Californian Fred Lewis lost his wife and seven children at Jonestown.

"I blame myself. I blame my wife," he told CNN. He also blames Jim Jones. "He was a con artist all the way."

But don't blame the victims, said one speaker at a memorial service held Tuesday at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco.

"Remember the people of Jonestown, not for their horrible deaths, but for who they were -- people in search of a better world."

Correspondent Don Knapp and The Associated Press contributed to this report.