Prophet of Death_The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings

by Pete Earley

  “Don’t do it,” the man warned. “That guy has been nothing but trouble.”

  Despite such advice, Wilcox decided to let Jeffrey move in. “The guy seemed so sincere,” Wilcox recalled, “and to tell you the truth, I felt sorry for him.” The rent was $100 per month, a figure well below the house’s rental value. There was only one stipulation. Wilcox had moved all of his personal belongings into the garage and had put a padlock on the door. He told Jeffrey to stay out of there. Jeffrey agreed and wrote Wilcox a check for the first month’s rent. That same day, Wilcox left Macks Creek. A few weeks later, Wilcox got a letter from his bank telling him that Jeffrey’s check had bounced. Wilcox called Jeffrey, who quickly apologized and mailed him another check. It bounced too. Wilcox made another call and this time Jeffrey promised to mail him a check that was good. When it cleared, Wilcox figured the first two had been harmless errors. He would soon discover that he was wrong.

  From the start, Alice didn’t like the farm. It was too isolated. Every day when Jeffrey left for work, she was stuck alone with a new baby and two boys with no neighbors. The only adult she ever got to speak with was Jeffrey and their relationship was once again in trouble. Jeffrey claimed that Alice was a nag. She was always complaining and demanding attention, he said. Alice claimed that Jeffrey was cold and harsh. He didn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own, she complained. Both agreed that sex was a problem.

  Said Jeffrey: “Being happy sexually with Alice wasn’t possible. She couldn’t give me what I wanted. I would not be out of line to say that if we had sexual intercourse six times a year that was a great year. I used to say that you could tell how many times Alice and I had made love by counting our kids—it was supposed to be a joke, but it wasn’t funny anymore.”

  Said Alice: “Jeffrey was impossible to satisfy when it came to sex. If Jeffrey didn’t have seven or eight orgasms a day, he felt deprived.”

  One night, Jeffrey confronted Alice.

  “Let’s stop playing games,” he said. “Let’s deal with the issue. This is a marital relationship and I have certain sexual expectations and I expect you to meet those expectations.”

  Jeffrey later insisted that Alice got angry and refused to have sex with him. “She simply refused to meet my needs,” he said, “and made it clear that she wasn’t going to.” Her refusal, he claimed, made him so frustrated that he began flirting at work with other women.

  Alice later told a much different story about why she and Jeffrey were having sexual problems.

  “Just before Thanksgiving, Jeffrey took me out to the farm we had rented. He left the kids at my mom’s and he told me we were going out there to be alone and to make love. I went along with him because I wanted to make him happy but I wasn’t prepared for what happened.”

  After they went into the farmhouse, Jeffrey told Alice to go upstairs and take a bath. While she was still in the tub, Jeffrey walked in naked. He told her to open the drain and let the water out, but he ordered her to stay in the tub. He then stepped into the tub so that he was facing her feet. According to Alice, Jeffrey bent down over her and defecated onto her breasts.

  “I discovered that Jeffrey was fascinated with his own feces,” Alice later told investigators and her psychologist. “He told me that he had been using it since he was thirteen. He would smear it on himself and masturbate with it.”

  After Jeffrey rubbed feces on Alice’s breasts, they had intercourse and then bathed together, she said. “It wasn’t that I was cold and uncaring,” Alice explained. “I just didn’t want to do all the things that he wanted me to do. I knew that my role as his wife was to satisfy him and I wanted to do that and make him happy, but after we moved to the farm, he not only wanted to smear his feces on me, he got so he liked holding me down and putting it on my face.... It was just too much ... so I began telling him no and that is what made him angry and that is what caused all of the fights.”

  Jeffrey refused during interviews to discuss his sexual practices with Alice. He considered their sexual life to be private. All he would say was that he had never done anything with Alice that “she didn’t want to do too.” Later, when he was specifically asked if he had smeared his feces on Alice, Jeffrey became upset. “That’s an outright lie!” he said. “That is not part of my lifestyle.” He accused Alice of making up stories about their sex life in order to win sympathy for herself. He had never abused her or engaged in any unusual sexual acts with her, he said.

  Shortly after Thanksgiving, Jeffrey began coming home late from work at night. He told Alice that he was taking a night class at the hospital so that he could become an emergency medical technician. Alice didn’t seem to mind until one Wednesday in December. Alice didn’t have a washing machine or clothes dryer at the rental house, so once a week, usually on Wednesday nights, Jeffrey drove her into Macks Creek to a Laundromat. He’d drop her off and go to his night class at the hospital and then return to take her home. On this particular night, Alice finished the laundry and waited for Jeffrey but he didn’t show up on time. She waited another hour and then called the hospital.

  “Is the class still in session?” she asked.

  The nurse, whom Alice knew, was confused. There were no night classes being taught at the hospital, she replied.

  Alice tried to hide her embarrassment. “Oh, I must have been mistaken,” she said. Alice didn’t know what to do so she waited another hour and then finally called Donna. They drove to the rental house together. Jeffrey wasn’t there. Donna took everyone home with her.

  The next day, Alice borrowed her mother’s car and she and Kristen drove to the farm. Jeffrey answered the door.

  “What’s going on?” Alice demanded. “Why didn’t you pick me up at the...”

  Before she could finish, Jeffrey slammed the door. She beat on it with one hand for several minutes until Kristen began to cry and then she drove back to her parents’ house. “I didn’t know what was going on,” she later said. “I knew he was mad at me because of our sex life, but he wouldn’t tell me what was the matter.”

  Alice and the kids spent Thursday at the Keehlers’. On Friday morning, Jeffrey called. He wanted to take Alice and the kids to McDonald’s for hamburgers that night after work, he said. He wanted to talk to Alice about their marriage and whether she was willing to become a “good, subservient wife.” Alice dressed the boys in their best outfits and put ribbons in Kristen’s hair. All of them waited in the living room. Five o’clock. Six o’clock. Around nine o’clock, Alice put the children to bed and she and her sister Terri went out to find Jeffrey. His truck was parked at the hospital, but he was gone. The following morning, Alice again drove to the farm in her mother’s car looking for Jeffrey but he hadn’t been there. It looked as if he had spent the night somewhere else. She sat down in the kitchen and wrote him a long letter. In it, she apologized for being, in her own words, “such a bad wife.” She was sorry that she had made his life so miserable, that she couldn’t satisfy him sexually or be obedient as the scriptures demanded. She begged him for forgiveness and finished the letter by asking him not to hate—or leave—her. “I felt that I had caused this entire mess,” she recalled. “Not only had I displeased Jeffrey, but I’d also disobeyed God because I had not been subservient to my husband.”

  On Monday morning, Jeffrey pulled into the Keehlers’ driveway. He hadn’t talked to Alice for three days. He’d simply disappeared. He told Alice that he needed to speak with her in private. They went for a walk.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  Jeffrey said he had spent the weekend in Springfield, about fifty miles south of Macks Creek, at a motel with a woman who also worked at the hospital. He said the woman wanted to marry him.

  “You’re having an affair?” Alice later remembered asking.

  “No,” Jeffrey said, “I was going to, but I didn’t.” Jeffrey explained that he and the woman had ended up staying in separate rooms. She had wanted to make love with him, but he had been physically incapable o
f having sex because “I’m still in love with you, Alice, and I couldn’t break our marriage vows.”

  Alice was stunned. “I knew he was angry with me, but I didn’t know he was seeing another woman. He told me that he had gone with her because he was so unhappy with me and because I wouldn’t do what he wanted. He said she told him that he was masculine and macho and everything that a woman wanted in a man, and she had offered herself to him and that he felt good about that, because that is how a woman was supposed to act, but that he didn’t love her. He loved me.”

  Years later, Jeffrey repeated much the same story in an interview. “I got involved with this woman at work because I was sexually frustrated. It wasn’t love. She had her problems, I had mine. It was nothing but animal heat. But I felt so guilty that I just couldn’t do anything and then I confessed everything to Alice.”

  Jeffrey told Alice that he wasn’t going to answer any questions about the Springfield trip. He just wanted her to know what she had driven him to do. “He blamed me totally and considered himself a hero because he had turned down this woman,” Alice said. Incredibly, Alice thanked Jeffrey for not committing adultery and for not leaving her and the children. Jeffrey then drove all of them back to the rental house. When it was time for bed that night, Jeffrey told her that he wanted to make love. He pointed toward the bathroom.

  “I’ll draw your bath,” Jeffrey told her.

  Alice said later that she understood what he wanted. She followed him into the bathroom and disrobed without complaint.

  The next day after Jeffrey went to work, Alice telephoned her parents and told them where Jeffrey had spent the weekend. Ralph Keehler was angry. Was Alice really so naive that she believed Jeffrey had spent a weekend in a motel with another woman and never touched her sexually?

  “Drop that son of a bitch,” he told his daughter. “Divorce him.”

  Donna was more conciliatory. “You decided to marry him, not me, and I’m not going to make the decision on whether you should break up your marriage,” she said. “That’s up to you.” Then she asked her daughter if she still loved Jeffrey.

  “Yes,” said Alice. Besides, she added, “Who else would take me? I have a baby, two boys, and I’m twenty-eight years old.”

  All that week, Alice and Jeffrey avoided talking about his tryst. But on Friday afternoon while Jeffrey was at work, his girlfriend called and boldly asked Alice to give Jeffrey a message.

  “Tell him I can’t go away with him this weekend,” she said.

  Alice slammed down the receiver. When Jeffrey got home, she screamed at him. Jeffrey got angry.

  “I can’t believe you believe her!” he snapped. “She is making all this stuff up because I wouldn’t have sex with her. It’s all a lie! She’s trying to get even with me.”

  Alice was caught off guard.

  “Do you think she would call you if she wasn’t angry and jealous?” he continued.

  Jeffrey’s explanation seemed to make sense, at least to Alice. “I believed him. I honestly believed that they hadn’t gone to bed together.” On Monday, Alice decided it was time for her to turn the tables. As soon as Jeffrey left for work, she telephoned the hospital and asked to speak to the woman.

  “Why are you bothering my husband?” she yelled. “Why are you making this stuff up? Is it because Jeffrey ditched you? Because he didn’t want to have sex with you?”

  “Is that what he told you?” the woman replied, mockingly. With a steady voice, she then recited the names of the motels and the times and dates that she and Jeffrey had been together. And then she added something else.

  “She told me that Jeffrey had taught her how to have oral sex,” Alice recalled, “and the way she described it and the words that she used—she was using Jeff’s vocabulary—I knew she was telling me the truth because they were the words that he had used to teach me about oral sex. She wasn’t lying. I knew that he had been the one telling lies.”

  Alice hung up and grabbed a telephone book. She called each of the motels and asked the clerks if a “Jeffrey Lundgren” had been a guest on the dates that had been quoted to her. “Every one of them told me that he had checked in. He even had used his real name. He didn’t even try to hide it. Everything she had told me was true.”

  Alice dialed the long-distance number of her friend Louise Stone and told her about Jeffrey’s affair. “I drove him to it,” she said between sobs. “I am not as sexually active as he wants me to be. If I’d only done what he had wanted and accepted it, then Jeffrey wouldn’t have looked elsewhere.”

  At this point, Alice didn’t mention Jeffrey’s fascination with feces. She was too embarrassed. She simply told Louise that Jeffrey wasn’t happy with her attitude toward sex.

  “Alice told me that she had decided that to make Jeffrey happy she was going to become a very sexual partner,” Louise Stone said later. “She said she didn’t know whether she could do it or not, but she said that she was going to convince Jeffrey that whatever he wanted was okay even if she couldn’t enjoy it. I felt that she was trying her best to become what Jeff wanted her to become sexually.”

  When Jeffrey got home, Alice told him that she thought it was best if they never mentioned his affair again. “She said that she forgave me and for two weeks, she reclaimed me and I reclaimed her, and we had a good sexual relationship,” Jeffrey said. “She did what wives are supposed to do and submitted her will to her Lord—me.”

  But the second honeymoon didn’t last long. One night in February, Jeffrey told Alice to put the children to bed early and come to bed. There was something new that he wanted to teach her, he said.

  “Jeffrey came up with two glasses and a bottle of cherry vodka and I was shocked because we didn’t drink, but he told me that he wanted me to drink some Coke and cherry vodka and we began drinking.”

  While they sat on the bed, Jeffrey asked Alice what it was like to be a woman during sex. He was curious about how it felt. What was it like for a woman to have an orgasm? How did it feel to have a penis thrust inside her?

  “I was getting pretty drunk and he told me that he wanted to do something different. He told me that he wanted me to give him a bath and wash his hair, which I did, and then he had me comb it and set it in rollers. He had me clean and file his fingernails and toenails and then polish them. Then he asked me for one of my nightgowns and he put it on. He asked me to shave his legs and I did and he put on a pair of my panty hose and I was pretty drunk by this time and he decided to model for me so I put makeup, women’s makeup, on his face and took out the hair rollers.

  “All this time, he was telling me to drink this vodka and Coke and I was really getting drunk. I was sloppy drunk and then he pulled this package out from under the bed and he said that he wanted to show it to me and he opened it up and took out a dildo and a leather harness and I thought, ‘My God, what is he going to do to me?’ But he told me that the harness was for me to wear. He wanted me to put on the dildo and he wanted me to have sex with him! He wanted me to have anal intercourse with him and it was supposed to be a rape. I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Jeffrey, this is too weird. I may be drunk, but I’m not going to do that.’ He said, ‘Oh yes you are,’ and we started arguing and that is when I decided just to get out of the bedroom so I went into the hallway and he came after me and he said, ‘You are going to do what I tell you to do,’ and I said, ‘Oh no I’m not,’ and he said, ‘Well then, I’ll get someone who will.’ I was drunk and furious and I yelled at him. I said, ‘Oh, you going to get your hospital whore?,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, she’ll do it for me.’ I yelled, ‘You son of a bitch,’ and I went for his throat. I dug my fingernails into his neck. I wanted to hurt him, hurt him so bad, hurt him like he had hurt me. I was so angry. I mean, I had tried and tried and tried to get him to tell me that he was sorry about having an affair, but he always refused. He always said, ‘I’m not going to grovel in the dirt for you, Alice. It’s your fault that it happened.’ I was so furious about everything—the lies, the affair, every
thing—so I grabbed him around the throat and tried to hurt him and he grabbed me and pulled me off and when he did, he threw me against the wall and my back hit the door, the doorknob, right in the middle of the back and I remember just going limp with the pain and sliding down the wall. I remember the pain was excruciating. I crawled into the bathroom and I locked the door and I passed out. He was trying to take the hinges off and was yelling at me to unlock the door, but I wouldn’t and I passed out.”

  Jeffrey later recalled the confrontation in the hallway differently. He did not mention anything about a sexual encounter or dildo. “One night I went downstairs to get something to eat and when I came back upstairs, she was waiting for me at the door of our bedroom with a baseball bat. She was enraged about the affair, almost catatonic, and she went on an angry tirade. She swung at me with the baseball bat and missed. I caught her with my arms and picked her up. I didn’t have any feelings of anger. She claims that I threw her against the doorknob, but that isn’t true. She didn’t hit anything when I tossed her back. A few days later, she slipped while she was walking down the stairs and fell and hit her back. That’s how she got hurt.”

  No one except Alice and Jeffrey actually knows what happened, but the result is documented in medical records at the Lake of the Ozarks Hospital. Regardless of the cause, Alice’s spleen was ruptured and began leaking blood. The injury went unnoticed for two weeks until Alice collapsed and lost consciousness one morning while visiting Jeffrey at the hospital. He carried her into the emergency room, where doctors discovered massive internal bleeding and operated to remove her spleen. Twice during surgery, Alice almost died.

  Jeffrey’s parents came down from Independence to the farm to take care of the children while Alice was in the hospital. By the end of March, Alice was released, but her medical problems were far from over. She developed a series of painful complications and remained bedfast. One night when she was lying in bed half asleep and under heavy medication for pain, Jeffrey had sexual intercourse with her. She was so groggy that she thought it was a dream at first. A few weeks later, she discovered that she was pregnant again. Alice, who was still taking large doses of painkillers, was terrified. She was afraid that the drugs that she was taking might harm her baby.