People always said that Jenny James's dreams would end up as nightmares. They said it in London in the late 1960s, when she first began to practise "primal scream" therapy in Ladbroke Grove. And they said it in the respectable Irish village of Burtonport, county Donegal, when she established a community of "Screamers" there in 1974. They said it when, to escape the scandal, she moved the community to the nearby island of Innisfree. And they said it when - after years of conflict with the forces of conservatism on the mainland - she finally fled across the Atlantic and, after two years of rough travelling through the Caribbean and South America with her three small children, set up the Atlantis Therapy Commune in 1988 on one of the remotest mountainsides in Colombia.

People always said that Jenny James's dreams would end up as nightmares. They said it in London in the late 1960s, when she first began to practise "primal scream" therapy in Ladbroke Grove. And they said it in the respectable Irish village of Burtonport, county Donegal, when she established a community of "Screamers" there in 1974. They said it when, to escape the scandal, she moved the community to the nearby island of Innisfree.

And they said it when - after years of conflict with the forces of conservatism on the mainland - she finally fled across the Atlantic and, after two years of rough travelling through the Caribbean and South America with her three small children, set up the Atlantis Therapy Commune in 1988 on one of the remotest mountainsides in Colombia. What no one predicted, though, was that the end would be so long in coming; or that, when it did, it would cause such shock waves. James's experimental lifestyle, based on principles of free love, Reichian release of repressed emotions and the rejection of European conventions, continued to thrive for another decade or so. And when, this month, it finally became clear that the dream was over, feature-writers across the world groped for words to give meaning to its apparent failure.The grotesque incident that brought it to a close actually took place in July. But, so remote was the corner of southern Colombia where the Atlantis commune was based - near Icononzo in the Tolima region - that the news took nearly three months to reach the outside world.Icononzo lies deep in guerrilla country, where the left-wing rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has for many years held more sway than the Colombian government and its paramilitary supporters. For more than a decade, members of the commune had maintained a harmonious coexistence with the FARC guerrillas. Then, last summer, for reasons that are only just beginning to emerge, the relationship turned sour. The 15 remaining members of the commune were advised to leave, and, for a while, did.

Then, in July, Tristan James - Jenny's teenage grandson - and another commune member, Javier Nova, decided to return.They were warned when they reached Icononzo that their lives were in danger, but took no notice. When they reached the village of Hoya Grande, a few miles downhill from the commune, they were seized, "tried" before a kangaroo court, taken out into the street, stabbed and decapitated Their bodies were burned. No one knows what became of their heads.There will be people who interpret this tragedy as some kind of moral comeuppance for a group once condemned by the Daily Mail as "a degradation of everything the family stands for". But while the lifestyle of the Atlantis commune was certainly unconventional - and its sexual economy was complicated beyond belief - it is hard to see how it deserved such a visitation of brutality.