Prophet of Death_The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings

by Pete Earley

Although Cheryl would sometimes tag along with Ann and her boyfriend to a football game, Cheryl didn’t go out on dates. She wasn’t unattractive, but she was plain and she did little to enhance her appearance. She had a round face and black wavy hair that had first started showing streaks of gray in college. She wore it cut short and most mornings simply brushed it. “I let it do what it wants to do,” she often joked, “because it will do that anyway.” She was five feet three inches tall, weighed one hundred and thirteen pounds, and had a nice figure, but even when she was in her early twenties, Cheryl had a matron’s air to her. Finding a husband wasn’t as important as earning a college degree in elementary education. “Cheryl was a very determined person,” said Ann. “If she wanted something done, she went out and did it and if you got in her way, tough luck.”

  During Labor Day weekend in September 1969, Ann and Cheryl attended a weekend church retreat for singles held at a campground in Excelsior Springs north of Independence. The men and women were paired off on Saturday night so that they could get to know each other. Cheryl was matched with Dennis Avery. Despite Ann’s probing later that night, Cheryl didn’t say much about Dennis. But that weekend, he called. They went to church together. She was twenty-two. It was her first date and it was his first date too. He was twenty-nine. Eight months later they were married. The wedding was held on May 29, 1970. They picked that date because Cheryl’s birthday was May 27 and Dennis’s birthday was May 28. They figured it would be easy for them to remember their May 29 wedding anniversary.

  Donna Bailey came to Independence for her daughter’s wedding. “I was let down when I first saw Dennis. I had been introduced to Ann Sherman’s boyfriend and I remember thinking, ‘Why couldn’t Cheryl get someone like him instead of someone like Dennis?,’ but I changed my mind after I got to know him and realized what a kind person he was.”

  Dennis didn’t make a good first impression. A neighbor of the Averys would later tell a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Dennis was “the typical nerd, with his pocket protector and everything.” He was a small-framed man, standing only five feet seven inches, weighing less than one hundred twenty-five pounds. Yet in photographs, he seemed to be overweight and to have a double chin. He slumped, wore thick glasses with self-darkening lenses, had a receding hairline, and seemed, according to several who knew him, to be rather slow-witted except when it came to quoting scriptures.

  Dennis pored over his Bible and the Book of Mormon. There wasn’t a time in Dennis’s life when the RLDS wasn’t important to him.

  The oldest of four children, Dennis grew up in Baldwin Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, where his father worked at a company that manufactured electrical medical equipment. His mother stayed at home until her children were grown. Then she became a librarian. She had been raised in the RLDS. His father was a convert. Their family life revolved around the church and Dennis never questioned his faith.

  Like Cheryl, Dennis was always serious. As a child, he was chosen to appear on The Art Linkletter Show. Along with four other children, he was interviewed by Art during a segment called “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Dennis gave short, somber replies that didn’t spark many laughs. Art quickly moved on.

  At Baldwin Park High School, Dennis was later remembered as one of those students who passed through unnoticed. “He was not someone who stuck in your mind,” said a classmate who graduated with Dennis in 1958. After graduation, Dennis worked as a clerk at a bank and then landed a job in the mailroom at Edwards Air Force Base. “He never did go off, like some youth in the area, with those who were protesting back in the sixties,” Lois Hartnet, an elder at the Covina RLDS congregation, later told reporters. “He was a dependable churchgoer who lived a good, puritanical lifestyle.” Dennis lived with his parents for eleven years after high school. When he finally decided in 1969 to move out, he decided to “gather” to Independence. He rented a room from a family and a short time later met Cheryl.

  Dennis couldn’t afford a honeymoon. He didn’t own a car. Money was a problem. It always would be. Dennis worked nights at the Centerre Bank in Kansas City, where he ran a machine that sorted canceled checks. He would eventually work there for seventeen years, and during that time, he would never be promoted to a better job nor earn more than $24,000 per year. “He was a pleasant fellow,” said a fellow employee, “but he had absolutely no ambition.

  I think he was scared to try new things. I always thought he was rather simple-minded, but one day he began talking about religion and he really knew his scriptures.”

  Each year, Barbara Carter received a Christmas card from Cheryl. “She would talk about how poor they were. She wasn’t complaining, it was just a fact. No matter how hard they tried, they always were broke.”

  Cheryl taught school after she got married. But she quit when their daughter, Trina Denise, was born on March 7, 1974. They had another daughter, Rebecca Lynn, on January 23, 1976. Shortly after that Dennis suffered from prostate and urinary problems and didn’t think that he could father any more children. But on August 3, 1982, Karen Diane was born. Dennis and Cheryl called her their “miracle” baby.

  No one was certain why Dennis and Cheryl decided to attend the Slover Park congregation because they clearly didn’t fit in. Cheryl either made her family’s clothing or bought it secondhand at a Salvation Army store. “I think one of the reasons why the Averys latched onto Jeffrey and Alice was because they were nicer to them than most people in the church,” recalled Georgia Milliren. “The Averys were not particularly easy to like. They were wimpy, mousy people and a lot of members just simply avoided them.”

  When Cheryl first mentioned Jeffrey Lundgren in a letter to her mother, Donna was pleasantly surprised. She knew his mother. Lois had lived in Centralia with her parents, Alva and Maude Gadberry, for a short time. She and Donna had been in the same Sunday school class as children. It was one of those ironic twists of fate, Donna told Cheryl, that frequently happened in the close world of the RLDS saints.

  Even though Jeffrey and Alice complained about the Averys, they did nothing to sever the friendship. When Cheryl had to go into the hospital for an appendectomy, it was Alice who volunteered to prepare a meal for Dennis and his girls. Later, she got Tonya Patrick to go with her to tidy up the Averys’ house before Cheryl came home. The place was filthy and cluttered with junk. There were holes in the walls, the toilet was leaking water, the yard needed to be weeded and mowed. A storm had damaged the roof and the roofers had simply tossed the old shingles down on the grass when they made the repairs. Dennis hadn’t bothered to pick them up. Nor did he volunteer to help the women clean. Instead, he sat in his easy chair as they worked around him. When it was lunchtime, he told his daughters to make him a sandwich and bring it to him. Tonya was exhausted and irritated when she got home later that night. She told her husband that Dennis Avery was the laziest man that she’d ever met.

  At Slover Park, there were lots of other stories about the Averys. One church member recalled how he had stopped by the Averys’ house on a particularly cold winter night and found their living room icy cold. “Dennis was sitting in his chair complaining about how cold it was, so I looked around and noticed that someone had closed the air vents in the room. There was no way for warm air to blow inside. I said, ‘Well, Dennis, here’s your problem—someone closed your vents. Just open them up.’ What amazed me was that he knew the vents were closed! He said, ‘Oh, I just haven’t had time to get around to opening them.’ That family spent the entire winter freezing in the living room because he was too lazy to open the vents!”

  Another church member recalled how she had gotten a panicky telephone call from Cheryl one night. “What do you use to get orange juice off the floor?” she asked. The church member suggested a well known cleaner. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Cheryl replied. She explained that one of the girls had spilled the juice four days earlier. “Cheryl had been fretting the entire time about what to use to get it up. She couldn’t make up her mind,” the woman rec
alled. “I often wondered how either of them ever made it in this world.”

  Ann Sherman would recall Cheryl and Dennis much less critically. “Cheryl was definitely the strong one in the family, and sometimes she would complain about Dennis because he didn’t help out much around the house. But he wasn’t lazy. He went to work faithfully. The thing about Dennis was that he had an easygoing nature about him. He didn’t get real concerned about most things and he didn’t always follow through on things once he got started.” Years later, Ann would also recall that Dennis seemed to withdraw even further after he befriended Jeffrey and Alice. “He sort of adopted an attitude that the Lord will provide. He felt the Lord was directing his life, almost to the point that he didn’t have to do anything in terms of planning. It was like he was depending on God to figure out a way to make things happen. That was kind of his philosophy. God was in charge.”

  Donna Bailey also saw a change in her daughter once she and Dennis became friends with the Lundgrens. Cheryl and Dennis became “fanatical,” she said. “Cheryl had always studied her scriptures, but she was reading them over and over and over again.” When the RLDS held its controversial worldwide conference in April 1984, Cheryl asked Donna if she would come to Independence to babysit for her granddaughters. She and Dennis wanted to attend the debate at the conference about ordaining women into the priesthood. Neither Cheryl nor Dennis told Donna the entire reason why they wanted her there. Both of them felt that a vote in favor of letting women become priests would be a clear signal that Satan had successfully steered the RLDS away from God’s truth. Dennis even speculated that God might respond by bringing the earth to an end. If that happened, Dennis and Cheryl wanted Donna to be with their daughters.

  Donna agreed to make the trip, but before she left for Independence, she received a letter from her daughter that troubled her. “Cheryl told me that she and Dennis had decided that their girls couldn’t watch television anymore and she said that they were against playing cards too.” Donna and her husband both liked to watch television and play cards. Donna decided to telephone Cheryl.

  “Won’t you make an exception for Dad’s sake?” Donna asked.

  “No,” said Cheryl. No television. No card playing. Donna agreed to babysit anyway. “Cheryl and Dennis were heartbroken when the church decided to ordain women,” she recalled. “Cheryl told me that there was only one man at Slover Park who was brave enough to tell the truth and oppose women being ordained. That was Jeffrey, and she said that he had told her that he had gotten death threats because of what he preached.”

  Unlike the Lundgrens, Dennis and Cheryl enjoyed their weekend visit in Kirtland during August 1984. They returned to Independence electrified about what Jeffrey had showed them in the Kirtland temple. Cheryl was so excited that she wrote her mother a long letter. Because Jeffrey had sworn her to secrecy, she didn’t mention Jeffrey’s dream, the path in Chapin Forest, or how God was going to choose a new prophet to replace Wallace B. Smith. But she did mention that she had, at last, found someone who could give her the “answers” that she had been seeking. There was something about Jeffrey Lundgren, she wrote, that was special.

  Chapter 15

  JEFFREY’S discovery of a symbol for man, but not for woman, convinced him that he was on the right track. But the temple was filled with other carvings and no one knew what they meant. During his first two weeks on the job, Jeffrey went through all the historical records in the temple archives. He’d even got Eleanor Lord to check art books at the local libraries. But the meaning of most designs remained a mystery. In October, Jeffrey learned that Raymond Treat was lecturing for several nights at an RLDS church in Pittsburgh. As always, Ray was talking about similarities that he had found between the Nephites and Lamanites in the Book of Mormon and the Maya culture in Mesoamerica. Jeffrey figured that Ray might be able to identify some of the symbols in the temple because he was a trained archaeologist. So Jeffrey and Alice drove to Pennsylvania to listen to Ray’s speech. It wasn’t too different from the one that Jeffrey had first heard at the Slover Park congregation in 1982, but as Jeffrey watched the color slides of Maya ruins, he noticed that a few of them contained symbols that looked to him like those in the Kirtland temple. After Ray completed his speech, Jeffrey introduced himself and explained how it was Ray who had first gotten him excited about reading the Book of Mormon. Jeffrey then mentioned that several of the designs in the Kirtland temple seemed similar to those in Ray’s slides. Ray was intrigued.

  Although there was some printed material available before 1830 about archaeological discoveries in Mesoamerica, Ray was confident that Joseph Smith, Jr., and other early Mormons in Kirtland would not have known about the Maya. If Maya symbols were in the temple, then Ray would be able to add another bit of proof to his theory that the Mormon religion and the Maya were somehow linked. He told Jeffrey that he would gladly drive to Kirtland the next morning to look at the symbols. Another man joined Ray and Jeffrey as they talked. Tom Miller had accompanied Ray from Independence to Pittsburgh. Tom was an elder in the church and was interested in seeing the temple too.

  When the two men arrived in Kirtland the next day, Jeffrey hustled them into the temple and Ray carefully examined all of the symbols. He agreed that some seemed similar to those found in Mesoamerica, but he couldn’t be certain until he had done more research. Tom was impressed by Jeffrey. “He clearly had a special understanding about the temple,” he later recalled. “Jeffrey was seeing things there that others had missed.” Both men found Jeffrey’s discovery of the symbol for man interesting, especially Tom. He had been a delegate at the 1984 world conference and had personally felt that women shouldn’t be ordained. Yet, when it came time for a vote, he had raised his hand in favor of permitting women to be priests simply because all those around him had raised their hands. Now he was certain that his decision had been a mistake.

  After the tour, Jeffrey invited Ray and Tom to his house to meet Alice and talk more about the temple. Within an hour, Jeffrey and Tom were, as Alice later put it, “clicking like crazy.” Tom was well versed in the scriptures and there was an authority to his voice when he spoke, partly because of his background. At age thirty- eight, Tom had worked as a police officer and as a game warden. But he had eventually quit both jobs, he explained, because of “politics.” Tom prided himself on being a man who didn’t “kiss up” to anyone. If he thought that his boss was doing something stupid, he told him so.

  Tom and Ray had met at a church service in Independence and become friends. Ray had invited Tom to come with him to Pittsburgh because Tom was between jobs. His wife, Patti, worked at a medical lab in Independence.

  Jeffrey decided to take Ray and Tom to Chapin Forest so they could see where the stones used in the foundation of the temple had been cut. He told them that he felt that the quarry area was hallowed ground, but he didn’t tell either of them about his dream or the significance of the footpath. As they walked down the path, Tom spotted several holes that had been drilled into stones in the creek bed that ran adjacent to the path. Tom’s college degree was in agronomy and he told Ray and Jeffrey that in the 1800s, stonemasons frequently cut stones in a quarry by drilling a line of holes in them. The holes would be four or five inches apart. The masons would then fill the holes with water and when it froze, the water would expand and cause the stone to crack along the line of holes. “These holes were probably made by the men who built the temple,” he said.

  Jeffrey, Tom, and Ray climbed down a small embankment to get a closer look at the holes in the creek bed. It was about a five- foot drop to the stream from the path. After the men examined the holes, they turned around and started to climb back up the embankment, but Tom suddenly stopped. “Hey! Look at this!” he hollered. Part of the embankment was made of stone—the same gray stone found in the creek bed and the temple foundation—and someone had drilled nearly a dozen holes into it. These holes, however, were different from the ones in the creek bed. They were nearly twice as large and they had b
een drilled at angles and in a circular pattern. Each hole looked as if it eventually met the others somewhere deep inside the rock.

  “Why would someone drill there?” Jeffrey asked.

  Tom put his mouth against one of the holes and blew into it. There was no resistance. “There’s got to be a chamber in there,” he announced. Tom Miller would later recall during an interview the excitement that he felt that afternoon in October 1984. “We broke off a branch and stuck it in one of the holes and we never hit the end,” he said. “Man-oh-man, we were really having fun. The more we talked, the more convinced we all became that we had really found something. We speculated that these were air holes that led to some secret chamber. The next thing we knew, we were convincing ourselves that Joseph Smith, Jr., had hidden something in this chamber—gold plates probably. We were on a roll.” Tom decided to ask God if there was a hidden chamber behind the stone. He left Jeffrey and Ray and walked down the path to pray alone. “I can’t tell you now whether I wanted to see something so bad that I imagined it or whether I truly had a vision that day,” Tom said later. “But I came back to Jeff and Ray and I said, ‘My understanding is that there is a chamber hidden here and there are gold plates hidden in it.’”

  Ray and Tom needed to get back to Pittsburgh for Ray’s lecture that night, but they promised to return to Kirtland the next day. After they had gone, Jeffrey told Alice about Tom’s statements in the park. It fit perfectly with his dream. They began speculating about what might be hidden there. The Book of Mormon contained plenty of stories about brass and gold plates that had never been found. There was another mystical artifact mentioned in the book that had vanished centuries ago. It was a magnificent gold-and-jeweled sword known as the Sword of Laban, and it played a role in one of the most important and controversial stories in the Book of Mormon. According to the Mormon scriptures, God told a Hebrew prophet named Lehi that He wanted him to leave Jerusalem and go to the New World. But Lehi didn’t want to make the journey without several brass plates that contained the genealogy of his family. The plates were being held by a man named Laban, so Lehi sent his son, Nephi, to fetch them. Laban, however, refused to give up the plates and no matter what Lehi offered him, he wouldn’t budge. One night Nephi decided to make a final attempt at getting the plates. He went to talk to Laban and found him drunk. Nephi also spotted Laban’s magnificent gold sword.