Prophet of Death_The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings

by Pete Earley

  Jeffrey decided to make another try at joining the priesthood. Only this time around, he decided to lay the necessary groundwork so he wouldn’t be rejected. “I volunteered to play the piano on Wednesday nights before the evening service. Every Sunday, I made certain that my family was in Sunday School and church. Churches are always looking for someone to volunteer and I was that person. I did all the jobs nobody wanted.” Jeffrey also clued in Alice and together they used Dennis and Tonya to make contacts at Slover Park.

  “Jeff and Alice were anxious to get prestige,” Tonya later recalled. “They didn’t have it, they wanted it.... They were constantly pushing us to introduce them to important people and then they would either latch onto them or try to.”

  Jeffrey’s plan worked. Two elders told him privately that they were going to recommend that he be “called” into the priesthood. “I was actually amazed at how easy it was really,” said Jeffrey. “I discovered that it really doesn’t take much effort to take charge in a church and what really was shocking was how easily people were led. Most people didn’t even read the scriptures. They had no idea what was in them.” Alice agreed. Jeffrey could have hidden a Reader’s Digest in his Book of Mormon and read from it and most people at Slover Park wouldn’t have known the difference, she said.

  While things were going well at church, Jeffrey was in trouble again at work. He had been given access to a company car because he was frequently required to drive between the main hospital and a satellite hospital in an adjoining community. One weekend in December 1982, Jeffrey was seen driving the company car when he clearly wasn’t at work. Jeffrey’s boss, Henry Thomas, asked him if he had been using the car for personal trips. Jeffrey said that he hadn’t, but a few days later Thomas found out otherwise. “I called Jeffrey into my office again and I told him straight to his face that he had lied to me,” Thomas later said. “He got all red and huffy. I wrote a disciplinary report about the incident and I told him that the next time he took that car and used it on his personal business and then lied about it, I was going to fire him. I came down hard and I figured that threatening him with termination would make him straighten out.” It didn’t.

  Two days later, Thomas caught Jeffrey using the car to run personal errands. He fired him. It was three weeks before Christmas and Jeffrey was out of work. Alice called Dennis and Tonya. What was she going to do? she asked. She and Jeffrey didn’t have any money to buy their children presents. Dennis and Tonya offered to help. Tonya took Alice shopping and spent $400, which was charged to the Patricks’ credit cards.

  “I didn’t mind helping at first,” Dennis remembered, “but Jeffrey started stopping by all the time and he’d be broke and he’d need gas money and he’d just sort of sit there until I gave him ten or twenty dollars. It was like he just expected it.”

  Three months after Jeffrey was fired from St. Mary’s Hospital, his former boss received a telephone call from the personnel director of a company in Independence that sold equipment to hospitals.

  “I’m thinking about hiring Jeffrey Lundgren,” he explained.

  “Oh, my God!” Thomas recalled saying. “I sure as hell wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  The director asked why, but Thomas was prohibited by hospital privacy regulations from telling him.

  “Well,” the director said, “I’ve interviewed him and I think he could help us and I’d like to help him. He’s got a wife and kids and he is really active in his church.”

  “Let me give you some advice if you do,” Thomas replied. “Hide the company credit cards, don’t let him have a company car, and watch his expense accounts or it will come back to haunt you.”

  Despite the warning, the director hired Jeffrey as a salesman in April 1983 and issued him a company credit card and automobile. Both were to be used only for business purposes. Within a few weeks, Jeffrey was asked to resign because of questions over the charge card and car expenses. It was the last paying job that Jeffrey ever held.

  Chapter 10

  WITHIN the RLDS Church, Dr. James H. Robbins was held in reverent esteem. A gentle, soft-spoken man in his early forties, Jim Robbins had converted to Mormonism in 1965 and had moved to Independence a short time later to help build Zion. By 1978, he had developed a lucrative medical practice and was regarded as one of the city’s most successful podiatrists. But just as he reached the peak of his profession, Jim began to feel guilty. “I felt that God was advising me to give it up,” he later told his fellow saints. “Money and status should not be the most important goals in life.” For six months, Jim prayed, and then one evening he was visited by two church elders. Jim asked them to anoint his head with oil and pray for him by a “laying on of hands”—touching him on the head with their hands. While they were praying, one of the men said that he felt led by the spirit to tell Jim that God was “opening a door” for him and that he should not be afraid to go through it. After they finished praying, one of the men turned to Jim. “Are you thinking about selling your practice?” the elder asked.

  “I was taken back by that question,” Jim recalled, “and I said, ‘Why yes.’ And he said, ‘I thought so, that came to me while I was praying for you.’”

  Jim considered that incident a divine revelation. He felt God was instructing him to sell his medical practice. So he did just that. He stopped performing lucrative foot surgery, opened an office in his house, and began providing medical care to the elderly and poor, frequently without charge.

  In the spring of 1982, at about the same time that Jeffrey was starting to work at his short-lived job as a biomedical equipment salesman, Jim was about to join two other devout Mormon families in what the church calls a “living in common endeavor.” It was a concept that dated back in the Mormon Church to Sidney Rigdon’s early teachings at Kirtland. Rigdon believed that the first Christians mentioned in the New Testament had lived communally and he encouraged his followers to do the same. One group established a commune outside Kirtland in 1830, but within a year they began quarreling over possessions. “What belonged to one brother, belonged to any of the brethren; therefore we would take each other’s clothes and property and use it without leave,” a member wrote in his diary. When Joseph Smith, Jr., moved to Kirtland, he disbanded the commune. Over time, numerous other devout Mormons had organized similar communes but few lasted.

  “I was interested in a ‘sharing all things in common’ living arrangement,” Jim later explained, “because I felt that God wants every man, woman, and child to live for one another, not simply to accumulate as much as they can for themselves.” In October 1982, Jim and his wife, Laura, and their children were about to move into a commune when Jim suddenly became ill. Doctors found that he had stomach cancer. He was forced to back out of the commune but the other two families went ahead and combined their assets. Jim, meanwhile, was readied for surgery. As he prayed one night, Jim felt a “calmness” come over him.

  “The peace of God settled upon me to a degree that I had never experienced before in my life. If you try to use logic, it will not make sense, but it was real and I found myself carrying on a two-way conversation with the Lord. I didn’t hear voices or anything like that. What happened was that whenever I thought of a question in my mind, the answer would suddenly come to me. What he told me was that He was prepared to heal me when I first got cancer but that the unbelief of the saints was so monumental that if I had stood up and announced in church that the Lord had cured me of cancer, no one would have believed me. So what He said was that He had decided to go ahead and let me be stricken with cancer. That way, everyone would know that I had it. He then told me that I could go ahead and have surgery, but not anything else. ‘I will take care of you,’ He said. God didn’t tell me how long I would live and He didn’t tell me that He was curing me. He simply said that He would take care of me.”

  Jim underwent surgery and had a large section of his stomach removed, but his doctors were not able to remove all of the cancer before it spread into his lymphatic
system. His surgeon told Jim that he would have to undergo immediate chemotherapy. Jim refused and, despite the doctor’s protests, returned home without undergoing any additional treatment.

  Two months after his surgery, Jim and Laura Robbins were randomly paired with Jeffrey and Alice at a weekend church retreat for married couples. The two couples were supposed to spend most of the weekend together as part of the program. Jeffrey recognized Jim. By that time, Jim had already shared his “personal testimony” about his cancer operation with several congregations and his moving story was becoming well known in Independence. Some saints suspected Jim would soon die from cancer, but others believed that God was using Jim and his faith to inspire other saints. Regardless, Jim Robbins was a genuine celebrity and Jeffrey and Alice were eager to get to know him and Laura.

  At first, Jim didn’t like Jeffrey. He thought he was arrogant and pushy. But he was impressed by Jeffrey’s ability to recall scriptures. After the weekend retreat, the two couples began socializing. They would get together in each other’s homes for what Jeffrey and Jim called “scripture shootouts.” Jim would cite a scripture and Jeffrey would counter with a scripture that seemed to either say the same thing or contradict it. Then the two men would continue citing verses until one of them ran dry.

  “Jeffrey didn’t enjoy light conversation, but he was captivated by the Book of Mormon and digging for hidden or deeper meanings in the scriptures,” Jim said. “I was in the priesthood and he wasn’t yet ordained but it soon became apparent that he was far more brilliant than I when it came to knowing verses.”

  In February 1983, two months after meeting the Lundgrens, Jim and Laura told Jeffrey and Alice that they wanted to help support them. “We knew Jeffrey was out of work and they were hard up so we decided to give them two hundred dollars a week,” Jim said. In a moment that he would later have difficulty explaining, Jim also announced that if the Lundgrens were interested, he and Laura would like to combine their two families into an “all things in common relationship.” Jeffrey and Alice quickly agreed.

  “As soon as I brought up the subject, I knew in my heart that I was making a mistake,” Jim recalled years later. “In looking back on it, my only explanation is that I think I felt guilty. You see, we had originally planned to join with these two other couples before I was diagnosed as having cancer. They had gone ahead and had disbanded after about a year. I think asking the Lundgrens to form an ‘all things in common relationship’ was sort of like marrying on the rebound after a divorce.”

  The day after he first mentioned communal living to Jeffrey and Alice, Jim returned to their house and added a caveat. He and Laura would participate only if they didn’t have to go into debt.

  What Jim and Laura didn’t know was that Jeffrey and Alice were being supported by other church members as well. Along with the $200 that the Robbinses were giving them each week, the Lundgrens were receiving periodic donations from two other families, and the church was paying their rent and utilities from a special fund set aside for poor Mormons. Jeffrey and Alice were also calling on Donna and Ralph when they needed cash and were still borrowing small sums from Dennis and Tonya.

  Sonny and Louise Stone, the Lundgrens’ friends from their navy days, moved to Independence at about this time and Louise was shocked when she saw how Alice and Jeffrey were living. “I met Alice one afternoon and we went shopping. She told me that Jeffrey was unable to find a job and that she didn’t know how they were going to feed the kids that night. She literally didn’t have any food in the house. All the time that we were gone, she was fussing about how they were broke. When we got back to her house, we walked up the steps and their front porch was covered with groceries. I mean, bags and bags of food.”

  “Help me carry these inside,” Alice told Louise.

  “Alice, where did all this come from? Who left it here?” Louise asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Jeffrey told me that he was going to pray about getting us enough to eat and he prayed last night about it.”

  “What?” Louise asked incredulously.

  Alice became irritated. “Louise,” she lectured, “I don’t question God and neither should you.”

  “I told Alice that it wasn’t right for her and Jeffrey to live off other people,” Louise remembered. “I asked her why Jeffrey didn’t go get a job like everyone else. She told me that Jeff had things to do for God and therefore he wasn’t required to work like everyone else. Other people were supposed to take care of him. That was their job. His was to serve God.”

  Once the Lundgrens became friends with the Robbinses, they no longer had as much time for Dennis and Tonya or Sonny and Louise. Jeffrey, in particular, didn’t want to bother studying scriptures with Dennis. “He can’t keep up with me,” Jeffrey complained to Alice. “He’s just not as sharp as Jim.”

  There was one passage of scriptures in particular that Jeffrey and Jim were trying to decipher. It was recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants, a Mormon book that contained all of Joseph Smith, Jr. ‘s revelations from God, as well as those given by God to Smith’s successors. This particular revelation was identified as “Section 76.” [The book listed revelations in numerical order but used the word “section” rather than “number” to identify them.] According to it, Joseph Smith, Jr., and Sidney Rigdon had been meditating on February 16, 1832, when they were shown a revelation and a vision. What the two men saw was eternity and it was quite different from the simple heaven and hell concept that most other religions described. There were actually three different levels in heaven, Smith later explained. These included the Celestial [highest], the Terrestrial [middle], and Telestial [lowest]. Only the most devout saints could make it to the Celestial where God himself dwelt. Section 76 described in detail what kind of person would be assigned to each level. In the final sentences of the passage, the revelation also said that God had permitted Smith and Rigdon to see other “great and marvelous...works.” But He told them that they couldn’t reveal what they had seen.

  “For they are only to be seen and understood by the power of the Holy Spirit, which God bestows on those who love him and purify themselves before him; to whom he grants this privilege of seeing and knowing for themselves.”

  Jeffrey and Jim wanted to know what “great and marvelous” mysteries the two men had seen but had been forbidden to describe? So they came up with a plan. If God had appeared to Smith and Rigdon in Kirtland, Ohio, then Jeffrey and Jim would drive to Kirtland and ask God to show them what He had shown Smith and Rigdon.

  They made plans to leave with their wives in March. Jeffrey had never seen the Kirtland temple but he had read about its history. He knew that after Joseph Smith, Jr., and Rigdon had fled Kirtland because of the Mormon bank failure, the temple had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair. At one point, a Gentile farmer had used it as a sheep shed. After Smith was murdered in 1844, the Mormons in Utah and those in Independence both claimed ownership of the church. But in February 1880, a county judge ruled that it belonged to the RLDS. Since then, the RLDS had restored the temple and opened it for tours.

  The Robbinses and Lundgrens drove to Kirtland in an old station wagon that the Lundgrens had been given. They stayed in the home of a local church official who knew the Robbinses. Jeffrey and Jim had gotten permission to pray inside the temple after it was closed to tourists. About an hour before it was time for them to go inside, Jeffrey became fidgety.

  “What’s bothering you, Jeffrey?” Alice asked, but he didn’t reply. Jim and Laura Robbins noticed that Jeffrey was acting strangely. The two men had been told that they would have thirty minutes to pray in the temple before they would have to leave. They quickly hurried inside and sat on one of the wooden pews in the front. All of a sudden, Jim realized that he didn’t have any idea what to do next.

  “I guess we should pray,” he finally said. Jeffrey nodded, so Jim knelt down and asked God if He would show them the hidden mysteries described in Section 76.

  Nothing happened.

/>   Jim returned to his seat, feeling rather foolish. “It was obvious to me that we were in no condition spiritually to have such a marvelous experience as Smith and Rigdon had had.”

  Jeffrey stood up and began to pray out loud, but rather than asking God to show him a vision, Jeffrey asked God to heal Jim of his stomach cancer. As Jim listened, Jeffrey became so emotional that he could hardly speak. He began to weep.

  “I was touched by what he said, that he would ask God to cure me, and I was touched by his show of emotion because I had never seen that before in Jeffrey,” Jim later recalled, “but I told Jeffrey as we were leaving the church that I didn’t expect God to heal me. God had promised before my operation to take care of me and I trusted Him to do that. He never said that He’d cure me of cancer.”

  When Jeffrey later told his followers about his prayer and experience with Jim Robbins at the Kirtland temple in March 1983, he would claim that Jim collapsed as soon as he stepped outside the building. Jim would remember what happened a bit differently. According to Jim and Laura, the two couples rode to a nearby restaurant for dinner and while they were eating, Jim began to shake and became faint. He had recently had a bad viral infection and he thought that he was suffering a relapse. By the time Laura had paid the restaurant bill, Jim was shaking uncontrollably with chills. Jeffrey helped him crawl into the back of the station wagon and they left immediately for Independence.

  “I think we should get him to a hospital,” Alice said after they had ridden on the highway for about an hour. Jim entire body was shaking. Laura didn’t know what to do, but Jeffrey was calm.

  “He is going to be fine,” he said. “He didn’t get sick in a day and he’s not going to be cured in a day.”

  Alice glanced over at Laura. Neither one of them knew what Jeffrey was talking about. They stopped for the night at a motel in Richmond, Indiana. The next morning, Jim still felt ill. When they reached Independence, Jeffrey helped Laura put Jim in bed. The next morning, Jim said he felt fine when Jeffrey came to see him. Jim was certain he had been suffering from a virus. Jeffrey wasn’t.