Leo Ryan

Life & Legacy

Leo Joseph Ryan Jr. (May 5, 1925 – November 18, 1978) was an American politician and teacher. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented California's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 until his assassination in the Jonestown massacre in 1978. Before that, he served in the California State Assembly, representing the state's 27th district.
After the 1965 Watts riots, Ryan took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions in the Los Angeles area. In 1970, he launched an investigation into California prisons. While presiding as chairman of the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform, he used a pseudonym to enter Folsom State Prison as an inmate. During his time in Congress, Ryan traveled to Newfoundland to investigate the practice of seal hunting. He was also known for his vocal criticism of the lack of congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and co-authored the Hughes–Ryan Amendment, passed in 1974, which requires the president of the United States to report covert CIA activity to Congress.
In 1978, Ryan traveled to Guyana to investigate claims that people were being held against their will at the Peoples Temple Jonestown settlement. He was shot and killed at an airstrip on November 18, as he and his party were attempting to leave. Shortly after the airstrip shootings, 909 members of the Jonestown settlement died in a mass murder–suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. Ryan was the second of two sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives to be targeted in successful assassinations while in office, after James M. Hinds in 1868.
Ryan was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983.