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Memories stirred 35 years after Jonestown massacre when victims' remains found at funeral home

Associated Press
Published | Updated
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    FILE - This Jan. 1976 photo shows the Rev. Jim Jones, pastor of peoples Temple in San Francisco. The cremated remains of nine victims of a 1978 mass cult suicide-murder in Jonestown, Guyana, have turned up in a former funeral home in Delaware, officials said Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014. The state Division of Forensic Science has taken possession of the remains and is working to make identifications and notify relatives, the agency and Dover police said in a statement. On Nov. 18, 1978, Jones orchestrated a ritual of mass murder and suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Bodies of 911 massacre victims were brought to Dover Air Force Base, home to the U.S. military's largest mortuary. Many of the bodies were decomposed and could not be identified. (AP Photo/File) (The Associated Press)

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    A view of the inside of the former Minus Funeral Home in Dover, Del., Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014, where police say the cremated remains of nine victims of a 1978 mass cult suicide-murder in Jonestown, Guyana, were discovered. The state Division of Forensic Science has taken possession of the remains, discovered at the former Minus Funeral Home in Dover, and is working to make identifications and notify relatives, the agency and Dover police said in a statement. The division last week responded to a request to check the former funeral home after 38 containers of remains were discovered inside. Thirty-three containers were marked and identified. They spanned a period from about 1970 to the 1990s and included the Jonestown remains. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (The Associated Press)

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    A lockbox hangs on the door of the former Minus Funeral Home in Dover, Del., Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014, where police say the cremated remains of nine victims of a 1978 mass cult suicide-murder in Jonestown, Guyana were discovered. The state Division of Forensic Science has taken possession of the remains, discovered at the former Minus Funeral Home in Dover, and is working to make identifications and notify relatives, the agency and Dover police said in a statement. The division last week responded to a request to check the former funeral home after 38 containers of remains were discovered inside. Thirty-three containers were marked and identified. They spanned a period from about 1970 to the 1990s and included the Jonestown remains. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (The Associated Press)

DOVER, Del. – Survivors of the Peoples Temple murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, say painful memories have been stirred up 35 years later after some victims' remains were found in a shuttered Delaware funeral home.

Some bodies that arrived back in the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base in 1978 were claimed by families. Some were cremated. Others were buried in a mass grave in California.

On Thursday, officials revealed that not all had been brought to a final resting place. The cremated remains of nine were discovered in the decrepit funeral home in Dover.

Jonestown survivor Laura Johnston Kohl is now a retired teacher from San Diego. She says all the survivors she keeps in touch with are traumatized "because that door had been closed."

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