Jim Jones, Death Toll: 923. Another famous and bloody cult-leader, Jim Jones was the leader of "The People's Temple", and their mass-suicide was the biggest single loss of non-military American lives before 9/11. Jones was a classic megalomaniac psychopath, in some ways the very stereotype of the 'evil cult leader'. In the 1950s he became an ardent communist, and was even personally persecuted during the McCarthey hearings. In the late 1950s he started the People's Temple as a charismatic church with leftist leanings (preaching what he called "Apostolic Socialism"). He was in fact a strong advocate for integration and civil rights in the 1960s; his church attracted a large number of African-Americans as a result. But he often referred to himself as an atheist; he admitted he was using religion to try to promote a new type of Marxist society. He soon started implying to his followers that he, and not Jesus, should be seen as their Savior, and then as their God. His leftist politics earned him the praise of certain media, and of left-wing political stars of the era like Governor Jerry Brown, Harvey Milk, Walter Mondale, and then First Lady Rosalyn Carter. But when some of the dirtier aspects of his operation were starting to come out in the press, Jones moved his whole church to a commune he named "Jonestown" in Guyana, South America. He ran his sect with demands of absolute obedience, mind control, and there were credible allegations of torture. Based on reports of abuse, a congressman named Leo Ryan went to Jonestown to investigate, and he found out things that confirmed most of these claims, as well as 15 members of the sect that desperately wanted to leave. One of Jones' followers attacked the congressman with a knife, but the attack was thwarted; the congressman decided to leave (along with the church members who wished to go with him), but Jones sent armed men to the airstrip as they were boarding their plane to murder them. Ryan and four others died. Jones then told his followers at the commune that they had to "commit revolutionary suicide" to stop American forces from coming in and killing the adults and taking the children to be brainwashed into capitalist zombies. Church members were then made (some of them by force) to drink cyanide-laced kool-aid; Jones himself died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 909 people died at the commune, 304 of these were children.