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San Francisco and the world were shocked by two public tragedies which occurred hear the end of the year 1978. First was the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 Peoples Temple followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, plus U. S. Congressman Leo Ryan and several members of his staff and of the press, died on November 18 in a bizarre ritual of suicide and murder in the Guyanese jungle. Television, radio, and daily newspapers all provided intense coverage of the disaster, color pictures of the horrible carnage appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek (4 December 1978), and within two weeks two book-length journalistic reports (Kilduff & Javers, 1978; Krause, 1978; also see Zee, 1980) provided further details about the cult, its leader, and the mass death in the jungle. Accounts became public of Rev. Jones' sadism and sexual exploitation of men and women, his political wrongdoings, and the concentration camp-like atmosphere at Jonestown — news that had a particular impact in San Francisco, the city from which Jones and his group emerged and where there still remained a group of his followers plus many friends and families of those who died in the jungle.
Then, on the mid-morning of December 4, the news suddenly broke that Mayor George Moscone and a member of the Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk, had been murdered in their offices in San Francisco's City Hall. The assassin, Dan White, was himself a