Marshall Kilduff is a journalist currently writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

. He is noted for being the coauthor of the investigatory report criticizing the leader of Peoples Temple

Peoples Temple

Peoples Temple was a religious organization founded in 1955 by Jim Jones that, by the mid-1970s, included over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco...

, Jim Jones

Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip.Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in...

. In 1978, after the publication of the article in New West Magazine, Jones and the Peoples Temple congregation fled to Jonestown

Jonestown

Jonestown was the informal name for the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, an intentional community in northwestern Guyana formed by the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones. It became internationally notorious when, on November 18, 1978, 918 people died in the settlement as well as in a nearby...

, Guyana

Guyana

Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...

. Kilduff has been with the Chronicle ever since, becoming an editor and later an editorial writer. He began a weekly quiz in the Chronicle's Insight section testing readers' knowledge of the news of the week.

Early life

Kilduff was born in San Francisco in 1949. He went on to attend Town School for Boys through eighth grade and later St. Ignatius College Preparatory

St. Ignatius College Preparatory

St. Ignatius College Preparatory is a preparatory school in the Jesuit tradition serving the San Francisco Bay Area since 1855. Located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, St. Ignatius is one of the oldest secondary schools in the U.S. state...

 before transferring to St. George's School, Newport

St. George's School, Newport

St. George's School is a private, Episcopal, coeducational boarding school in Middletown, Rhode Island, USA, just east of the city of Newport. The school was founded in 1896 by the Rev. John Byron Diman, a member of a prominent Rhode Island family. It sits on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean...

 for the remainder of high school. After graduating, Kilduff attended Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

and graduated with a major in English.