by Pete Earley
Jeffrey, meanwhile, was facing his own worries. He had written bad checks to several area merchants. Some of the checks had been written on accounts that had been closed months earlier; other checks were from accounts that contained no money. A merchant tipped off Donna. A local businessman was so angry that he was going to ask the county attorney to prosecute Jeffrey. “I went over and paid the checks,” Donna recalled later. “I collected quite a few of them. We do quite a bit of business with people and we live here. Credit was extended to Jeffrey and Alice because of us and I felt morally responsible to not leave them hanging.” Once merchants heard that Donna was paying Jeffrey’s bad checks, they began calling her at home. The calls came every night. None of the checks that Jeffrey was writing was for more than thirty dollars. Most were for gasoline or milk or other groceries. But as quickly as Donna paid them, he wrote more. Within a month, she had depleted what little savings she and Ralph had. She decided to confront her son-in-law.
“Jeff, you got to stop doing this,” she said. “This is the third time that I’ve gone around and gotten these checks for you and we can’t afford to do it anymore.”
He didn’t respond.
“If you got many more floating around, you better make them good because the prosecutor comes down real hard on bad checks around here.”
Jeffrey nodded, but didn’t follow her advice. He wrote another bad check to his landlord. The Lundgrens had lived at the Wilcox farmhouse for nearly one year, yet had paid only two months’ rent. Wilcox started eviction procedures. Once again, Jeffrey and Alice and their children were forced to move in with Ralph and Donna.
Wilcox had felt bad when he decided to evict the Lundgrens, but when he visited the farmhouse after they were gone, whatever sympathy he had for the family vanished. The first thing that he noticed was that Jeffrey had broken into the garage where Wilcox had stored his personal belongings. Jeffrey had taken several items and had been using them inside the house. As soon as Wilcox stepped through the back door of his house, Wilcox’s heart sank. “The place was a wreck. It looked like a tornado had sucked up everything and thrown it around.” He suddenly smelled a pungent odor coming from the basement. Wilcox walked downstairs and nearly gagged. For some reason, Jeffrey had used a saw to cut through the pipe that drained the toilet. “There was toilet paper, feces, urine, everything—dropped directly down onto the basement floor just like in an outhouse,” Wilcox recalled. “There was a pile of human waste at least one foot deep and six feet in diameter.” Covering his mouth, Wilcox hurried back up to the kitchen. How could someone live with such filth in the basement? he wondered. And why would Jeffrey have done such a thing? Why would someone want a pile of feces in the basement?
Wilcox went through the entire house looking for damage. There was plenty. Holes had been knocked in the walls, carpets were stained and filthy. When he reached the master bedroom upstairs, Wilcox found something else that he thought was curious. Inside one of the closets were stacks of pornographic magazines that Wilcox later described as sadomasochism and bondage publications. Something tossed in the corner of the closet also caught his eye. Wilcox reached down and picked it up, but as soon as he realized what it was, he dropped it.
“It was a plastic dildo that was still caked with feces,” Wilcox said. “I mean it was caked with it. They hadn’t washed it. They’d just tossed it in there.”
As he left the house, Wilcox couldn’t help but wonder at the contradiction Jeffrey posed. “He was radical in his religious beliefs. He was intensely conservative and in one room of the house he had left about every book you could think of about the RLDS religion. He had rows and rows of them.” Yet upstairs Wilcox had found the opposite sort of literature. It was almost as if there were two different Jeffrey Lundgrens, both extremes. One holy, one evil. “He just wasn’t operating from the same perspective that most people operate from. I have never met a person who wanted to be liked more than Jeffrey. He wanted to be liked, he wanted to be admired, yet he didn’t want to do anything to earn you liking him. At the same time, I also never knew anyone who thought so much of himself. It wasn’t arrogance; it was intense self-importance. He simply looked upon himself as someone who was unique, you know, special, and he felt people needed to treat him special.”
On August 6, Jeffrey came home from work and announced that he had quit his job at the hospital. He had not said anything that morning about quitting. He didn’t have another job lined up. Alice was dumbfounded. She was six months pregnant, they hadn’t found another house to rent, Jeffrey still owed local merchants for bad checks.
“Why did you do it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I can make more money in Independence,” Jeffrey replied. “Besides, they don’t appreciate me at the hospital.”
Jeffrey would not say anything more.
Years later, Bernie Wilson would recall why Jeffrey had resigned. That morning, a hospital employee had walked into an office and caught Jeffrey and his girlfriend embracing. “Jeffrey denied that he was having an affair, but he had been caught fondling this woman’s breasts and there was little doubt in my mind what they were up to,” Wilson said. “I didn’t give him much choice but to quit.”
Jeffrey left for Independence the morning after he resigned. He moved into an apartment with his brother, Corry, and told Alice that he would send money whenever he could. During the four-month period that Jeffrey was gone, he mailed her a total of five dollars, Alice later said. In December, Alice went into labor and was taken to Lake of the Ozarks Hospital. Jeffrey drove down from Independence but was clearly uncomfortable at the hospital. Alice still didn’t know the truth about why he had resigned. Jeffrey spent the night sleeping in the car in the parking lot rather than in the lobby. The next morning, Alice gave birth to a boy.
“I was so terrified that the drugs I’d taken after my spleen was removed had harmed my baby, but the doctor said, ‘Alice, he’s got all of his fingers and toes.’ And I was so happy that I started crying. You see, I had wondered why God had spared my life when my spleen ruptured. I should have died. My life was so miserable but He spared me so that I could give birth. I looked over at Jeffrey because I wanted to tell him and share it with him and I reached for his hand and he knocked it away. He was crying and I said, ‘What’s wrong? The baby’s okay! He’s okay!,’ and Jeffrey glared at me and he said, ‘HE!,’ and I said, ‘Yes, honey, it’s a boy,’ and Jeffrey said, ‘Alice, I wanted a girl! Can’t you do anything right?,’ and he turned around and he walked out. He left me there with my son and just walked out.”
Alice named the boy Caleb, after Caleb the son of Jephunneh, mentioned in the Old Testament book of Numbers. “I named him by myself. I chose the name Caleb because Caleb in the Bible hadn’t been scared off by adversity and run away from things. He had also told the truth when everyone else lied.”
The day after Caleb was born, Alice mentioned to the doctor that she wanted to have a tubal ligation. She didn’t want any more children.
“I don’t think we can do that,’’ the doctor replied.
Alice asked why. She was certain that her insurance would cover the cost.
“What insurance?” the doctor asked.
“I thought that our insurance had covered all of my medical bills,” Alice later explained, “because Jeffrey had been covered by the hospital’s employee policy and he had told me that we were still covered by it even though he had quit. What I found out was that Jeffrey had taken me and the kids off the policy months earlier and had been pocketing the extra cash that he saved. We owed the hospital thousands and thousands of dollars from my spleen surgery and they weren’t going to do anything else for us until they were paid.”
When Donna came to visit her daughter and new grandson later that day, she found Alice in tears.
“Mama,” Alice blurted out. “I married Jeffrey for better or worse, but it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.”
Chapter 9
EVEN though Jeffrey was s
pending his weekdays in Independence searching for work, he would come to the Keehlers’ on weekends, and late at night, he and Alice would explore what Jeffrey liked to describe as their “secret world.”
“My mother had a sunken bathtub in the bathroom that we used and that is where most of this stuff with feces and urine took place,” Alice later said.
During one visit, Alice mentioned that her parents were going to be gone during the upcoming weekend. She and Jeffrey, along with their children, would have the Keehler house to themselves. Jeffrey arrived home earlier than usual the next Friday and was impatient with the kids. As soon as Alice got them to bed, he hurried her into the bedroom. “Jeffrey told me to strip and I did, and then he told me to lie down on the bed. He had bought some rope and he had already cut it into four pieces that he used to tie me onto the bed. He told me that he wanted to see what it was like, you know, bondage. I went along with it because it didn’t seem like such a big thing.”
They had sex, and when it was over, Alice asked Jeffrey to untie her. He refused. “I began to panic and I said, ‘Jeffrey, untie me,’ and he said, ‘Then it wouldn’t be any fun.”’ Alice would later claim that during the night, Jeffrey had sexual intercourse with her numerous times. The entire time, she was tied in various positions on the bed. In the morning, she told him that she needed to use the bathroom. He untied her legs but tied her hands together after freeing them from the bed. He led her into the bathroom and then he climbed into the sunken bathtub. “He ordered me to urinate on him and I did,” she said. “Then we went back into the bedroom and he tied me back up.” Alice later told a friend that Jeffrey had kept her tied to the bed all day Saturday and most of Sunday. He only released her a few hours before her parents came home. “He told the kids that I was sick and couldn’t be disturbed so they stayed out of the room.”
Although she later said that she did not enjoy the experience, she candidly acknowledged that she had not complained to Jeffrey at the time. “I wanted to please him. I wanted to make him happy. I kept thinking, ‘Well, at least we are spending time together. At least he is not with some other woman.’”
Jeffrey found work at a hospital in Kansas City and he moved Alice and the kids up to live with him. But he only kept the job for a few weeks before quitting without explanation. He and Alice were broke as usual. When their landlord knocked on the door in late February 1981 demanding rent, Alice begged for more time. With tears running down her cheeks, she showed him her baby and her three other children and explained how Jeffrey was doing odd jobs to earn enough to feed them. He felt sorry for her and agreed to wait. Jeffrey, meanwhile, began writing bad checks.
One afternoon Alice received a telephone call. It was Jeffrey. He had been arrested by police for passing bad checks. Alice telephoned Donna for help. Jeffrey needed $300 in cash for bail.
“Honey, we just don’t got it,” Donna replied. Ralph suggested that they leave Jeffrey in jail, but Donna disagreed. She offered to put up their house as collateral.
Alice paused. “No, Mama, I can’t let you do it. I’m afraid Jeffrey won’t pay it back.”
Donna sent her son, Charles, in her car to Independence to pick up Alice. She also telephoned Ralph’s sister—the same woman who had worked at Drumm Farm as a cook and had helped them before when they needed cash. The aunt gave Alice a $300 check.
“Don’t make it out to Jeffrey,” Alice warned. “If I take it to our bank to cash it, they’ll simply confiscate the money to pay for other bad checks.”
The woman made the check out to Ralph. Alice and Charles drove to Macks Creek to get Ralph’s signature and cash it. En route, Alice began to pray. “I reached the bottom, the absolute bottom. I had been married to this man for eleven years and we had nothing to show for it, absolutely nothing. I had always dreamed about having a house with a white picket fence and a nice family. But now I was thrilled just to have enough money to buy milk for the children. What had gone wrong? I remember Charles had fallen asleep in the front seat while I was driving and it was raining and I just started talking to God. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I said. ‘I’m married to this man for life. He lies to me. He can’t keep a job. He cheats on me. Why, God, are You doing this to me?”’
As she drove toward Macks Creek, Alice remembered the summer of 1969 when the patriarch had said that she would marry a companion who would do great things for the church. “I began to think that maybe God had a purpose for doing this, but I just didn’t see it.”
A few days after Jeffrey was bailed out of jail, he got a job at one of Independence’s oldest hospitals, St. Mary’s, a 365-bed institution operated by the Roman Catholic Church. He worked as a biomedical technician and was paid $32,000 per year, the most money he had ever earned. Under pressure from Donna, Jeffrey used most of his first paychecks to clear up the bad checks that he had written in Macks Creek. In return, the charges against him were suspended and later expunged from his record.
For the first time in their lives as a couple, Jeffrey and Alice had enough cash to pay the rent, buy groceries, and still have a few dollars left over. Jeffrey began buying rifles. “I want to have a better gun collection than my father,” he told Alice. She began buying antiques. “I want to have a better collection than your mother’s,” she told Jeffrey.
In the fall of 1981, Alice found a beautiful two-story stone house to rent located directly across from the Independence Medical Center on East Twenty-third Street. The rent was $400 per month.
Now that they had the money, Jeffrey and Alice began entertaining. Alice telephoned Dennis and Tonya Patrick, whom they hadn’t seen since all of them worked at Drumm Farm. Dennis was now a manager at Bendix Corporation and Tonya had given birth to a daughter, Molly. They had just bought a new house in Independence and were attending the Slover Park congregation. Dennis had risen to the rank of elder in the church, which meant that several nights each week he called on other saints. The Patricks and Lundgrens had a good time when they got together. But Tonya told Dennis later that she felt Jeffrey and Alice had changed. Jeffrey’s sexual jokes had made her feel uncomfortable.
“Oh, that’s just Jeff,” Dennis replied. “He’s always been that way, saying things.”
“No, Dennis,” Tonya said. “This time it was different.” In the past, she explained, Jeffrey had always tried to be funny. But this time she felt his innuendos were serious. “I think if I would have shown an interest, he would have jumped at the chance.”
One day in autumn of 1982, Alice was outside the rental house raking leaves when an elder from the Slover Park congregation pulled his car to the curb and stepped out to speak with her. He told Alice that an adult Sunday school class at the church was going to begin a new series about the Book of Mormon on Sunday and he invited her to attend. When Alice mentioned the invitation later that night to Jeffrey, he became irritated.
“Why’d you even talk to him?” he asked. “You’re my wife. Men shouldn’t be walking up and talking to you in the front yard like that.”
Jeffrey told Alice to forget about going to church, but Sunday morning, he awoke early. “I sat upright in bed for no reason,” he recalled, “and I woke Alice up and told her to get the kids ready for church. She was shocked and so was I, but for some reason I had decided to go—no—it was more than that, I felt compelled to go.”
The Book of Mormon class was being taught by Raymond C. Treat, a tall, lean man in his early forties, who had dedicated his life to proving that the Book of Mormon was an accurate historical account of early life in the New World. Treat had grown up in Wisconsin, where his parents owned a profitable cranberry marsh. They were not Mormons and neither was he, but in 1959, an employee at the marsh gave Treat a copy of the Book of Mormon and he was mesmerized. He converted to the RLDS and in 1961 married Mary Lee, whom he had met at church. She was fascinated by anthropology and together they decided to pinpoint where the ancient Nephites and Lamanites mentioned in the book had actually lived. Their studies took them to Mexico, and
after months of work and study, they decided that the early Hebrews had settled in Mesoamerica, an area extending from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua in which diverse pre-Columbian civilizations once flourished. Treat eventually inherited his family’s lucrative cranberry marsh, but he felt moved by God in 1975 to sell it. He used the proceeds to establish the Zarahemla Research Foundation, a nonprofit operation dedicated to investigating the archaeological aspects of the Book of Mormon. The Treats chose the name Zarahemla because that was what the Nephites and Lamanites called their homeland. The foundation operated out of a nondescript brick building in downtown Independence and had two employees—Ray and Mary Lee. They lived on a shoestring budget, made trips to archaeological sites in Mesoamerica, and published their findings in their own newsletter called The Zarahemla Record.
Jeffrey and Alice had found Treat’s slide presentation about Maya ruins fascinating but it was a comment that Treat made about how the Book of Mormon had been written that made Jeffrey snap to attention. “Everything in this book,” Treat said, lifting up his well-worn copy, “every word is there for a reason. God had some reason for including it.”
“It was like Ray Treat had put a key into my heart and turned it on full speed,” Lundgren recalled. “I began to ask myself, ‘Why is this story here? Why is this word used here? Why did God use this particular phrase? What is He really trying to tell us?’ I began to look at the scriptures in an entirely different way. Each one was a clue left by God. Memorizing a scripture wasn’t enough. You needed to examine each individual word and discover its meaning. When you did that you could actually see God’s thought process. From that point on, no one could keep me away from church. I had to know more.”