On a quiet residential street in Berkeley, California in late February 1980, a triple homicide reopened a wound that many people hoped had begun to close after the 1978 People’s Temple catastrophe in Guyana. The victims—Jeannie Mills, her husband Al, and their teenage daughter Daphene—had once been insiders in the Temple’s world, and later became among its most outspoken defectors. Their killings remain one of the most haunting, hotly debated crimes connected to the post-Jonestown aftermath.
Before they were known publicly as the Mills family, Jeannie and Al had been deeply involved with the People’s Temple. Jeannie (born Deanna Mertle) worked in Temple operations and communications, and Al served as the group’s photographer.
The family ultimately broke away years before Jonestown, and their departure was not quiet: Jeannie wrote a memoir about life inside the Temple, titled Six Years with God: Life Inside Rev. Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, and the couple became active in efforts to support other defectors and families still connected to the group.
That activism placed them near the center of one of the defining turning points in the Jonestown story: relatives and defectors pressing U.S. officials to investigate the Temple’s Guyana operation. Those efforts helped spur the fact-finding trip led by Leo Ryan, which ended in deadly violence and preceded the mass deaths at Jonestown in November 1978.
On February 26–27, 1980 (accounts vary), police were called to the Mills’ small cottage home in Berkeley. Inside, Jeannie and Al were found in a bedroom with fatal gunshot wounds; Daphene had also been shot. She was reportedly still alive when discovered, but died soon afterward.
Investigators quickly noted details that fueled fear and suspicion. Firstly, there was no obvious forced entry, and burglary was not considered the motive. Secondly, the murders were described as execution-style, a phrase that intensified speculation about a targeted attack.
And perhaps most strangely of all, the couple’s teenage son, Eddie Mills, was in the home and was not physically harmed—an element that would become central to later controversy and investigative focus.
Because the Mills’ had publicly opposed the People’s Temple, and because the Jonestown deaths were still recent, many survivors and defectors feared retaliation. In the years after 1978, rumors about Temple loyalists targeting enemies circulated widely, and the Mills murders became one of the most cited cases whenever those fears surfaced.
The idea of a People’s Temple “hit squad” has never been definitively proven, however, and later commentary notes that investigators considered multiple possibilities, including ones much closer to home.
For decades, the Mills murders lived in an uneasy space: deeply famous in Jonestown-related history, yet unresolved in the criminal-justice system. The most dramatic development came in 2005, when Berkeley police arrested Eddie Mills—by then an adult—after he arrived back in the Bay Area.
But the breakthrough didn’t hold. Prosecutors declined to file charges, citing insufficient evidence, and Eddie was released. Reporting and later summaries describe the case effectively returning to cold-case status, with the arrest ultimately not producing a prosecution.
Sadly, the triple murder is still unresolved more than forty-five years later. Jeannie and Al Mills tried to warn others about the People’s Temple at a time when that warning came with real risk; their deaths, just over a year after Jonestown, became a symbol of how long the Temple’s shadow seemed to stretch.
Crime Immemorial 