They Murdered My Friend

Thirty years after the Jonestown massacre, Sandra McElwaine remembers her unlikely friendship with its most famous victim—Congressman Leo Ryan, who was gunned down on the tarmac.

Meeting Leo Ryan was like encountering a whirlwind, an exuberant force of nature. He put out his hand, smiled and sort of swooped into my life at a dinner at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in the spring of 1978.

He told me he was a congressman from San Francisco. I told him I was a reporter for the Washington Star and the conversation took off. By the end of the evening he had asked for my number and asked me out. He was attractive and fun and not a political stiff, so I accepted and a few nights later he arrived to pick me up.

I found a post card on the floor mixed in with the pile of mail. As I turned it over I saw Leo’s signature. He must have sent it shortly before he was killed. I think I screamed.

In between those two events, however, there was a certain amount of consternation. I was recently separated and this was my first real date in years, so a couple of friends became deeply involved. One, a senate spouse, checked all available official documents on his background and pronounced him, “very interesting.” Another worked the grapevine and deemed him to be a “safe” date . But after I got to know him the latter was not an adjective I would ever have applied to Leo Ryan. Concerned and kind, he was also the ultimate risk taker, an iconoclast with an edgy, hard charging quality about him.

That night we went to the movies and saw Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby”, strolled the streets of Georgetown and went back to his Capitol Hill house and talked. He told me about growing up in a family of strong-willed women, supporting the release of Patty Hearst, and going undercover in Folsom prison where he was locked up for ten days in order to discover what conditions really were. (On a side table in his office kept a chess set made from toilet paper and tooth paste, a gift from the inmates on Death Row.) I got home at 1:30 AM and there were umpteen frantic messages from my friends. Where was I???

Leo and I became friends. When he was in town that summer he would pop by, a craggy blue-jeaned figure, usually with a six-pack. He would sit in my garden, often reviewing the world situation with my teenage son, who genuinely liked him because Leo always treated him as an adult.

The last time I saw Leo was mid-November. We had dinner at his house—he was a pretty good cook when he had the time—and he told me about an upcoming trip to Jonestown, Guyana. There was a foreboding in his voice. He was going, he explained, because so many of his constituents had expressed grave fear about relatives and friends who had followed their spiritual leader, the messianic Reverend Jim Jones of Peoples Temple in San Francisco, to a remote commune in the jungle of the former British colony. He was frustrated that the State Department had stonewalled his attempts to find out what was going on in Jonestown.

He’d telegrammed Jones that he intended to visit the settlement.