by Pete Earley
“And then she started feeling the need to compete with my mother,” he continued. “My mother had told Alice that we would never have as much as they did and this superiority complex of my parents, which was entirely my mother’s doing, really got to Alice. When my mother got a one-point-one-karat diamond ring for her wedding anniversary, Alice fussed until I bought her a one-point two-karat diamond ring. It had to be bigger than my mother’s.”
Exactly who was to blame for the couple’s runaway expenses is impossible to tell. But relatives and friends later suggested that Jeffrey and Alice were both irresponsible with money. Much of their cash went for frivolous expenses—eating meals in restaurants, Jeffrey’s constant snacking. Both loved to go to movies, as many as three or four per weekend. By January 1977, Jeffrey and Alice had accumulated $22,000 in unpaid bills and that didn’t include their $22,500 house mortgage.
One morning, they were served with an eviction notice. Alice telephoned her mother. Unless they came up with $300, they were going to be kicked out of their house. Donna wrote them a check and Alice and Jeffrey drove over to get it. Alice said they were going to take the check directly to the Farmers Home Administration office, but on the way home, Jeffrey and Alice stopped to get something to eat. They cashed the check and used some of it to pay for the meal. The money never made it to the FmHA. The mortgage went unpaid.
Without explanation, Jeffrey quit school even though he was only a few credits short of graduation. Hal Sappington, who had returned to campus, was dumbfounded. “It was like Jeffrey vanished. He was here one day and gone the next.” Assistant Dean Postlethwait was just as shocked. “Something was wrong, but no one knew what.”
Jeffrey would later tell his followers that he had been forced to quit because of Alice. “She told me that her father could get me a good-paying job in the ironworkers union. We needed the income so I quit school and went to the union hail,” he explained. “But I only got one job before there was a strike and I was out of work.”
Alice would later tell investigators that Jeffrey had been forced out. “Jeffrey got caught stealing money. He had collected some sort of student fee in the electrical lab and instead of turning the money in, he spent it.”
The records office at CMSU does not keep disciplinary files from 1977. Those records were shredded years ago. But a school official recalled that Jeffrey had been involved in some sort of disciplinary dispute. “He didn’t just leave,” this official recalled. “There was a reason.”
Although he was now out of work, broke, and still deeply in debt, Jeffrey remained optimistic about becoming a priesthood member. It was the one area of his life where he was still successful. In the Knob Knoster RLDS congregation, he was earning a reputation as a spokesman for the fundamentalists, just as he had done at the student union. One evening after dinner, however, the priest who had recommended Jeffrey stopped by to tell him that the district RLDS office had decided against recommending Jeffrey for ordination. The president of the RLDS stake didn’t know Jeffrey that well, the priest explained, so he had telephoned Keith Johnson, who had grown up the area, and asked him about Jeffrey. “Keith told him that I wasn’t mature enough spiritually to be ordained,” Jeffrey recalled. He didn’t take the news well. “I felt betrayed, totally betrayed.”
Jeffrey was so angry that he decided to drop out of the RLDS. Joseph Smith, Jr., hadn’t needed a church to teach him about God and neither did Jeffrey. “They’re going to regret doing this to me,” he told Alice.
A few days before he was supposed to be evicted, Jeffrey telephoned his parents and they, in turn, talked to Jeffrey’s grandfather, Alva Gadberry. He knew a contractor who needed someone to help do some electrical wiring at the Andrew Drumm Institute, commonly called Drumm Farm, in Independence. Some strings were pulled and Jeffrey was hired at five dollars per hour. It wasn’t enough to keep the government from foreclosing on his house, but it was enough to buy groceries. Jeffrey worked hard and made a good impression on the institute’s director. He offered Jeffrey a full-time job as the farm manager and Jeffrey agreed. The job included use of a rent-free cottage. Jeffrey and Alice moved to the farm. A short time later their house in Knob Knoster was sold on the courthouse steps.
Jeffrey’s job at Drumm Farm was to repair equipment and oversee the livestock. Founded in 1930 by cattleman Andrew Drumm as a home for “orphan and indigent” boys, the institute was designed to be a working farm. Between fifty and sixty boys, ages six through seventeen, milked cows, tended livestock, and raised crops on some 360 acres. Jeffrey liked the work, and when he learned that the institute needed a couple to work as houseparents and oversee ten boys, he telephoned Dennis and Tonya. They had just finished college, were married, and were looking for work.
Dennis and Tonya took the houseparents job and moved to Drumm Farm, where they quickly resumed their friendship with Jeffrey and Alice. Most nights, the Patricks would drop by the Lundgrens’ cottage. Alice and Tonya would chat while Jeffrey and Dennis studied their scriptures or played chess. Occasionally, Dennis and Jeffrey would go hunting at night. “The place was overrun with skunks and Jeff was afraid that one of them might bite one of the boys,” Dennis recalled. The two men would ride across the farm at night on a tractor searching for the animals, who would stop and stare when hit by the beams from the headlights. Dennis wore glasses and was a lousy shot. Jeffrey had perfect vision and rarely missed. “I think I can see almost as good as an eagle,” he told Dennis.
The Patricks were not the only friends who spent time with the Lundgrens at Drumm Farm. Sonny and Louise Stone stopped by once while passing through town. Alice was thrilled, but Jeffrey was aloof. He spent most of the night ignoring them. Near the end of the visit, however, someone asked Jeffrey about the farm manager’s job and he began telling the Stones about his plans to artificially breed cattle. For the next hour, Jeffrey described in unnecessary detail how cattle reproduced and were artificially inseminated. “It was the most bizarre conversation I have ever heard,” Louise later remembered, “because it became clear during it that Jeffrey was absolutely and totally fascinated with the sex life of cows. It was weird.”
Less than a year after he had started work at Drumm Farm, Jeffrey abruptly resigned. When the Patricks asked why, Jeffrey told them that he had quit because he was worried about his children. Andrew Drumm had stated in his will that the farm was only supposed to be used to help good boys who didn’t have a home. But Jeffrey claimed that the school was starting to admit juvenile delinquents and he told the Patricks that he didn’t want Damon, who was now nearly eight, and Jason, age four, to be influenced by them. Once again, Alice would later tell authorities a much different story. “Jeffrey got caught stealing hay from the farm. He was selling it and keeping the cash.”
Jeffrey and Alice were broke and didn’t have anywhere to go. What’s more, Alice was pregnant again. She turned to her relatives for help. Her father had a sister who worked at Drumm Farm as a cook and she agreed to loan them enough cash to rent an apartment. Within a week, Jeffrey announced that he had found a job at Trans World Airlines. He was part of a “preflight inspection crew” that checked airplanes when they were on the ground at night to make certain they were safe to fly. Jeffrey would leave for work just before 7:00 P.M., but he never came home at the same time. He told Alice that his hours varied because he could never be certain how much work any individual aircraft might take. If the airplane was in good shape, he’d come home early. Otherwise, he’d have to work late. It made sense to Alice, but she began to get suspicious after a few weeks when she noticed that things were disappearing from the house. A pair of candlesticks vanished. Jeffrey had also sold a rifle that he owned. Alice suspected that Jeffrey was either selling or pawning their valuables to get cash for groceries. She decided to ask him when TWA was going to give him a paycheck.
“I won’t get a check until the end of the month,” he replied.
Alice thought it was odd that TWA would make a new employee wait a full month
before paying him, but she believed Jeffrey. When six weeks went by and there was still no sign of a paycheck, she once again confronted him. This time, Jeffrey told her that someone in the accounting department had made a mistake and had given his check to the wrong person. It was going to take several days to fix the error. Alice was angry, but not at Jeffrey. She blamed TWA.
“Well how do they expect you to feed your family?” she asked.
Jeffrey promised to press TWA for the money.
The next morning, Alice used her neighbor’s telephone to call Donna. She explained that TWA still hadn’t paid Jeffrey and she asked Donna to loan her $300. Donna sent Alice a check. When another week passed and Jeffrey still hadn’t gotten paid, Alice decided to take matters into her own hands. After Jeffrey left for work, she jimmied the drawer to his desk. She was looking for some sort of employment papers from TWA that would tell her when Jeffrey was supposed to be paid. She suspected that he was hiding his paychecks from her. What Alice found instead was a stack of hard-core pornographic magazines and an angry letter from their landlord telling them that they were going to be evicted because their rent was overdue.
The next day when Jeffrey left the apartment to run an errand, Alice raced next door to use her neighbor’s telephone. She called TWA’s personnel office and demanded to know why her husband hadn’t been paid for nearly two months.
“I’m sorry, lady,” the TWA clerk replied, “but we have no record of a Jeffrey Lundgren working at TWA.”
“That’s impossible,” Alice said. “He goes to work at the airport every night.”
During the long pause that followed, Alice realized that Jeffrey had lied to her. She called Donna. “He’s doing it again—lying to me,” she sobbed. That night, she confronted Jeffrey.
“What have you been doing at night?” she demanded.
“Working at TWA,” he said.
“You’re a liar!” she screamed. Alice told him that she had called TWA’s personnel office.
Jeffrey began to cry. “I’ve been out looking for jobs,” he said.
“At midnight?” Alice demanded.
He changed his story. “I knew you’d worry if I told you I couldn’t find work,” he said. He had been depressed. Most nights he went to a movie. Sometimes he sat in a nearby diner and ate a piece of pie. Alice didn’t know whether or not to believe him.
The police arrived a few days later. In front of Alice and their two sons, Jeffrey was handcuffed and taken outside to a waiting squad car. “He had written a check for some gun that he wanted to buy and the check had bounced, but by then he had sold the gun for three hundred dollars and spent the money.”
Alice was pregnant again. She had no money. No way to post bond. No telephone and no car. Jeffrey had wrecked the Monte Carlo a few weeks earlier. She put her two boys to bed and walked into the living room. She turned out all of the lights, sat down on the floor, and began to sob.
“I remember sitting in the corner crying and I kept saying to myself, ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?,’ and then Jeffrey came home and he picked me up and held me and he told me everything was going to be all right. I don’t know how he got released and I never found out how he had gotten home. All I knew was that he had come home. I said, ‘Jeffrey, what’s happening to us?,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Alice, it is going to be okay. I will work it out.’ And I believed him. I believed he would take care of me.”
Jeffrey decided to ask his parents for money. “They can afford to help us,” he said. Don and Lois had helped them out before, but this time, they refused. Don lectured Jeffrey. “I’m getting old. Who’s going to take care of me if I spend all my savings on you?” he asked. Lois marched into the kitchen and returned with half a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, which she handed to Alice. It was time, Don and Lois said, for Jeffrey to support his own family.
Alice decided to telephone Donna. “Mom, I don’t have any money,” she said. “The kids don’t have any food to eat.”
Donna was irritated. She and Ralph were just barely making it themselves. She was in her sixties but retirement was out of the question because of Ralph’s medical bills. Still, Donna couldn’t turn her back on Alice. She told Alice that she and Jeffrey could move in with them.
By this time, the Keehlers had moved from Odessa to Macks Creek, a town of fewer than one hundred residents in the rolling hills of southwestern Missouri. They lived in a modest prefabricated modular home on a gravel road. Jeffrey and Alice arrived late on a Friday, June 15, 1979. The next morning, Donna handed Jeffrey the local want ads. Incredibly, he found a job that seemed promising. A new ninety-bed hospital had just opened in Ozark Beach, a resort community about thirty miles east. It needed a biomedical technician, a fancy title for someone who repaired medical equipment. With his navy experience in electronics, Jeffrey felt he was qualified. On Monday morning, Jeffrey borrowed Donna’s car and drove up state highway 54, to Ozark Beach. Bernie Wilson, the head of the hospital’s maintenance department, spent less than thirty minutes talking with him before offering Jeffrey the job. Jeffrey rushed back to Macks Creek to tell Alice, but when he got there, she had news of her own. She was in labor. Jeffrey hustled Alice back to the Lake of the Ozarks Hospital where he had just been hired. Alice gave birth to a daughter, Kristen. Jeffrey was in the delivery room, and when he stepped outside, Bernie Wilson was waiting to congratulate him and hand him a stack of employment forms to sign. Eager to impress his new boss, Jeffrey volunteered to begin work that same day. Later in the afternoon, he stopped in Alice’s room to see how she felt. Jeffrey had always wanted a daughter and he began to cry as he rocked “Krissy” in his arms. Alice began to cry too. “Everything’s going to be okay, Jeffrey,” she said. Surely, the worst was over.
Chapter 8
BERNIE Wilson considered himself a good judge of character. He’d spent twenty-three years in the navy, rising to the rank of chief petty officer, and during that time he’d come across all kinds. He could tell Jeffrey was smart when he first interviewed him and he seemed enthusiastic. The hospital job paid six dollars per hour. It wasn’t a big salary in 1979, but it was enough for a family to live comfortably on in rural Missouri if they stayed within a budget. One thing Wilson liked was that Jeffrey told him straight out that he was in bad financial shape and would be staying with his in-laws until he could save enough to pay rent.
Jeffrey did a good job at first. The hospital had just opened and there were plenty of maintenance chores. Jeffrey even volunteered to help Wilson with his paperwork. Because the hospital was new, the administrator wanted every department head to write out all the policies and regulations that they followed in their areas. Jeffrey ended up drafting most of Wilson’s papers. “He did a dam fine job at writing,” Wilson said later.
There was only one hitch during Jeffrey’s first month. One morning when Wilson walked through a section of the hospital that still hadn’t been opened, he found a room full of household furniture. Jeffrey said it was his. He needed a place to store some personal things that he’d moved down from Independence and he didn’t think anyone would mind.
“You got to ask permission before you do something like that,” Wilson said. Jeffrey turned red and apologized. He still didn’t have enough money to rent a house and there was no room for his furniture at his in-laws.
“Look, I got a two-car garage,” Wilson replied. “Why don’t you store it there.”
“Great!” said Jeffrey. But a week later, the furniture was still in the hospital. This time the problem was transportation. Jeffrey had been using his mother-in-law’s car but now she needed it. Wilson again offered to help. He had just bought a new 1979 pickup truck, so he said Jeffrey could buy his older 1972 Chevrolet truck for $1,200. Jeffrey could pay him whenever he got the cash. It was a good deal. Wilson’s “old” truck was dazzling. Its blue and white paint gleamed under thick coats of heavily applied wax, the eight-cylinder engine was tuned perfectly, the truck’s cargo area looked unused. J
effrey drove it home that night and moved his furniture into Wilson’s garage that weekend.
Three months later, Wilson began to get irritated. Jeffrey’s stuff was still in the garage. Wilson told him to come get it. When Jeffrey pulled up, Wilson was shocked. The 1972 truck that he had babied was a wreck. Its paint was scratched, the body was covered with mud, and the pinging noise coming from the engine reminded Wilson of the sound that after-dinner speakers at the hospital made when they tapped their spoons against their water glasses to get everyone’s attention.
Jeffrey didn’t seem to care that Wilson was upset. He’d found a place to rent, he announced. Wilson felt odd. Jeffrey hadn’t paid him a cent for the truck. He clearly wasn’t taking care of it. He had stored furniture in Wilson’s garage all summer without ever bothering to say thank you. And yet when Wilson had started to complain, Jeffrey had a way of making him feel guilty.
Jeffrey moved the furniture into a house owned by Jacob Wilcox on eighty acres east of Macks Creek in a heavily wooded area. Wilcox and his family had restored much of the 1940s farmhouse by themselves. It had two bedrooms and a bath on the top floor, another bedroom and bath on the main level and an unfinished basement. The only reason Wilcox had decided to rent the place was because he and his family were going to be leaving town for about a year. He didn’t want to sell it, but he couldn’t afford to leave it sitting empty. A friend had told Donna that Wilcox might be willing to rent his home cheap to a family if they took good care of it. Donna had passed the message on to Jeffrey who had immediately telephoned Wilcox. The novice landlord had put Jeffrey off at first. “I wanted to check Jeff out,” Wilcox later said. “This wasn’t a rental property. It was my home. I planned to come back and live here.” Wilcox called a friend who knew the Keebler family.