by Pete Earley
Tom got out of bed and walked outside onto the wooden deck behind his house. “It was the most beautiful night that I’d ever seen. The moon was full and the shadows cast by the oak and hickory trees were just fantastic. I was standing there, reveling in the beauty, just praising the Lord, when I looked over to the east and there were two bright stars and between them I saw a figure. It was Christ on the cross. I rubbed my eyes. I slapped myself on the head. I told myself that I was seeing something that wasn’t there. But I looked and it was. It was there and it was not something that I was imagining. Believe me, I put it through every test that I could think of and everything I did convinced me that what I was seeing was real. Christ was hanging there.”
When Tom moved to Independence, he and his wife, Patti, joined the Enoch Hill RLDS congregation, an ultraconservative group where prophecy was viewed as a vital part of every Sunday service. After several Sundays, Tom was asked to anoint a woman with oil and join other elders by putting his hands on her head and prophesying. Everyone waited for Tom to begin. “I didn’t know nothing from nothing, but I got caught up in the emotion of it and I started prophesying and pretty soon I was spouting out all sorts of things about this woman and what she was going to do with her life. It was purely emotional and none of it ever came true. I was really going wild.” Afterward, Tom felt guilty. “I knew that this woman believed everything I had said and I knew it was nonsense so I went to see her and I told her that I had been making stuff up, but she refused to believe me. She still thought what I had told her was from God. It seemed that there was no place in the church for intelligence. You either had to be caught up in the emotionalism of religion or you weren’t seen as a true believer. Intelligence was viewed as a block to being religious.”
Tom talked about his experiences with Jeffrey, who quickly agreed that most RLDS members were caught up in the emotionalism of religion, rather than intelligent study. Tom decided to read every verse in the Bible and the Book of Mormon that described contact between God and the Hebrew people. When he finished, he called Jeffrey. “Emotions are more a response to Satanic influence than the things of God,” Tom announced, “because emotions cloud your vision and your understanding of the truth.”
Jeffrey agreed, so Tom continued. “The truth is purely intellectual. In order to understand God, we must find out how He thinks and then attempt to become one with Him, make our thoughts into His thoughts, and share His intelligence and His truth. And that is an intellectual process, not an emotional one.”
Tom and Jeffrey were both excited by what Tom was saying. They talked for nearly an hour on the telephone. The next Sunday, Jeffrey claimed credit in the adult RLDS Sunday school class in Kirtland for an important discovery. He announced that he had studied every scripture that described God’s contact with the Hebrews and had found that “intelligence, not emotion” was the key to under- standing God. Jeffrey repeated Tom’s conclusions almost verbatim. There was only one slight change. Jeffrey made it sound as if everything he said was his idea, not Tom’s.
No one in Kirtland said much about Jeffrey’s “discovery,” but in Independence, Tom’s denouncement of emotional outbursts had irked most members of Enoch Hill. One night, however, a couple from the church stopped at Tom’s house. “They told me that I had all the indications of being ready to receive a special truth. I listened and what they said was so astounding, I didn’t know whether to continue listening or run through the door without bothering to open it.”
The couple told Tom that there was a secret way to decipher God’s truth by using intelligence, rather than emotion. It was called chiasmus. During the next two hours, the couple explained the process to Tom. Most Old Testament books, such as Psalms, Proverbs, Lamentations, Micah, Obadiah, Habakkuk, Nahum, and Zephaniah, were long Hebrew poems, they said. Prophetic books, such as Isaiah, Job, Joel, Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah, also contain lengthy segments of poetry. Unlike English poetry, Hebrew poetry doesn’t have rhyme or meter. Instead, Hebrew poems were written in a style called “parallelism.” Put simply, Hebrew poets always repeated themselves. A poet would write a line and then repeat the same thought in the next line only in a slightly different way. This was called “rhyme of thought rather than sound.” In Psalm 19, verse 1, the Hebrew poet wrote:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
Both lines say the same thing but in different ways. Over time biblical scholars found a variety of “parallel” poems. Some poets alternated lines that were synonymous. In Psalm 27, verse 1, the poet wrote:
The Lord is my light and my salvation:
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
Of whom shall I be afraid?
Scholars were finding so many different types of parallel writing that they developed a way to diagram them. They marked the first line of a poem with the letter A and whenever they came to another verse that was synonymous, they marked it with an A too. This “alphabet code” made it possible for the scholars to see how the poem was structured.
[A] The Lord is my light and my salvation:
[B] Whom shall I fear?
[A] The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
[B] Of whom shall I be afraid?
Once biblical scholars began using this marking system, they discovered an entirely new form of poetry, which they called chiasmus. A chiasm is much more difficult to see because it doesn’t follow the traditional A-B-A-B repeating sequence. Instead, it reverses it.
When diagramed, a chiasm is structured like this: A-B-B-A. Some biblical scholars call this form of writing “mirror imaging.” Verse 27 in chapter 2 of the New Testament book of Mark is a chiasm.
The sabbath was made for man,
and not man for the sabbath.
This is how the couple divided it for Tom:
[A] The sabbath
[B] was made for man,
[B] and not man
[A] for the sabbath.
A longer chiasm was found in Isaiah, chapter 6, verse 10:
[A] Make the heart of this people fat,
[B] and make their ears heavy,
[C] and shut their eyes;
[C] lest they see with their eyes,
[B] and hear with their ears,
[A] and understand with their hearts . . .
Once biblical scholars became proficient at identifying and diagraming chiasms, they made another startling discovery. Unlike other Hebrew poems, chiastic verses frequently had one line that was not repeated. This line was nearly always in the center of the poem. For example, Isaiah, chapter 55, verses 8 to 9, read:
[A] For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
[B] neither are your ways my ways . . .
[C] For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
[B] so are my ways higher than your ways,
[A] and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The words “thoughts” and “ways” were clearly repeated in typical A-B-B-A fashion, the couple told Tom. But stuck in the middle of the chiasm was line [C] and it stood completely by itself. There was no parallel line that mirrored the verse: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth . . . .”
The couple who explained all of this to Tom told him that the center line of a chiasm was the poet’s “secret” message. It was the most important verse in the poem, the one that the poet had really meant to emphasize. Readers who didn’t know how to diagram a chiasm would read these verses in Isaiah and interpret them to mean that God’s “thoughts” and His “ways” were far superior to the “thoughts” and “ways” of human beings, which was the most common interpretation. But what the Hebrew poet was actually saying was that “. . . the heavens are higher than the earth.”
In other words, the poet’s cryptic message was that heaven was an actual, physical place located directly above the earth. By locating chiastic poems and diagraming them, Tom could learn the “secret” truths of the Bible that were hi
dden from everyone but those intelligent enough to use chiasmus.
“What I was hearing was a totally new way to read the scriptures,” Tom recalled. “It was one of those rare moments when you feel that a truth has been illuminated to you.”
As soon as the couple left that night, Tom telephoned Jeffrey. It was late, but he didn’t care. He had to tell Jeffrey that there was a way to separate God’s truth from “the church’s emotional garbage.”
Chapter 18
KEVIN Currie started noticing several subtle changes in the Lundgren house in April 1985, once he began turning his paychecks over to Jeffrey. “When I first moved in, I was treated like an equal, an adult, and my opinions were respected. But once I began giving Jeffrey my paycheck, he and Alice started acting more like parents to me and exercising more and more control over my life.”
Kevin was the only person in the house earning a salary, yet whenever he needed money, he had to ask and explain to Jeffrey why he wanted it. The few times that Kevin did ask for cash, Jeffrey made it clear that he was taking it away from the rest of the “family” for his own selfish needs.
A few weeks after he moved in with Jeffrey and Alice, Kevin noticed another change. He was doing more and more household chores. It started when he volunteered to wash the dishes one night. All of the sudden, that became his job. So did babysitting for the children when Jeffrey and Alice went out, and cleaning the house. Kevin was soon cooking most of the meals at night too. “I had become the maid,” he said.
Jeffrey had spent quite a bit of time studying the scriptures with Kevin at night, but during the summer of 1985, four college-age interns arrived to help give tours through the temple and Jeffrey and Alice began focusing on them. Of the four, they liked Sharon Bluntschly and Daniel D. Kraft, Jr., the best.
“The interns didn’t know anyone else in town and Bill and Eleanor Lord were so much older that it was natural for them to turn to Alice and me,” said Jeffrey. “Sharon, in particular, was lonely so she started coming over to our house all the time.”
One of five children, Sharon had grown up in Beaverton, a farming town of l, 100 in the middle of Michigan, where she had done well academically in high school but had always been somewhat of a wallflower. She had enrolled at Graceland College in 1977, but she couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted to study so she eventually dropped out and went to work as a tour guide at the RLDS historical site in Nauvoo, Illinois. This was where Joseph Smith, Jr., had established a Mormon community after being driven out of Missouri by angry mobs in 1838. After that stint ended, Sharon had gone to Independence to work as a tour guide at the church’s headquarters. The RLDS had only three historical sites, and since Sharon had worked at Nauvoo and Independence, Kirtland was the only one left, so she had arrived to complete the trio. Jeffrey considered Sharon “a complete loser.”
“Sharon had never been on a date, never kissed a boy. She was short and weighed about two hundred and thirty pounds. It looked like she cut her own hair by putting a bowl over it. She acted like an old maid even though she was only twenty-seven. The only joy in her life was food. She had no self-esteem, no ambition. All she had ever done was float around the church as a tour guide.”
A few days after Sharon arrived in Kirtland, Alice invited her over to the house. “I was sitting on the couch with Alice in her living room and she began talking to me about really strange things,” Sharon later testified. Alice told Sharon that Joseph Smith, Jr., had appeared to Jeffrey in the temple. She mentioned that when she was in summer camp in 1969, a church patriarch had proclaimed that Alice would someday marry a man who would do great things for the church. “Alice continued telling me things and it was getting to the point where my mind couldn’t handle a whole lot more when Jeff suddenly walked in,” Sharon said. Jeff had been working in the visitors’ center when, he said, he felt that someone was talking about him at home. Alice immediately confessed that she and Sharon had been doing just that.
“How did you know?” Alice bubbled. Jeffrey didn’t reply. He just smiled.
Sharon was impressed. “How could he have known what we were talking about . . . . It was really amazing to me that he came in just at that time.”
Years later, Sharon would be more skeptical. “To me now,” she would testify, “it seems like it was a setup.” But when it happened, Sharon thought Jeffrey had the power to “sense” things that others couldn’t. Alice buttressed Sharon’s thinking. “Jeffrey isn’t like other men,” Alice told her. “He has been chosen by God for a special purpose. Someday he will be famous.”
That summer, Alice “adopted” Sharon. Alice taught Sharon how to fix her hair, how to buy clothing that complemented her figure, how to fix her nails. She was doing for Sharon what Lois Lundgren had once done for her. But Alice was adding a twist of her own to the transformation. She became Sharon’s sexual adviser. “Alice wanted me to work on being carnal, sensual, and devilish,” Sharon said later.
“Sharon knew nothing about sex,” Alice recalled, “so I set out to educate her.” Alice had Sharon watch a videotape of the sultry rock singer Tina Turner. “Tina may not be the most beautiful person in the world, but her body language makes her sexy,” Alice said. She and Jeffrey also rented a variety of soft porn to show Sharon to help her loosen up. Finally, Alice asked Kevin to take Sharon on a date.
While Alice made Sharon her summer project, Jeffrey worked on Danny Kraft, Jr., a lovable nineteen-year-old wisenheimer. At age six, Danny had decided to become a musician. At age eleven, he decided to become an artist. By the time he graduated in 1982 from high school in Nauvoo, he had mastered nine musical instruments, won dozens of art awards, and maintained a straight-A average. He was skinny, energetic, impressionable, and eager to please. Jeffrey originally had opposed Danny’s working as a guide. Although Danny regularly attended an RLDS church in Nauvoo, he had never been baptized. As soon as Danny arrived, Jeffrey began pushing him to join the church.
Just as they had done with Sharon, Jeffrey and Alice invited Danny into their home and quizzed him about his past. Jeffrey quickly decided that Danny’s carefree attitude was a facade. Danny’s parents had divorced in 1974. “He’s covering up the pain,” Jeffrey told Alice later. “Danny is looking for someone to love him—to take the place of his mom and dad and be his family.”
A few days later when Danny dropped by the house, Alice told him that she was uncomfortable being addressed as “Mrs. Lundgren.” It made her feel old, she joked. “Why not just call me ‘Mom’” she told Danny. “You can call Jeffrey ‘Dad.’”
Kevin had watched how Jeffrey and Alice manipulated Sharon and Danny, and he realized that neither of them realized it. “Jeffrey began using me to do reconnaissance that summer,” Kevin said. “He would send me over to spy on the summer interns, and when I came back to the house, he’d grill me about what they were saying and doing. He especially wanted to know what they were saying about him and Alice. I noticed that he would use the information to his advantage. He was a master at telling one person one thing and then telling someone else another thing and keeping them both in the dark.’’
On Memorial Day weekend, a group of young people from Independence arrived at the temple for a tour. Shar Olson and Richard Brand were among them. They were best friends. Both of them had made a similar trip on Memorial Day in 1984 and had enjoyed it so much that they had organized this one. By this time, word about Jeffrey had filtered back to most RLDS churches in Independence. “We had heard about this man who worked at the temple and supposedly knew a lot about it so we decided to ask him to teach a special class about the temple for our group,” Shar later recalled. Jeffrey quickly agreed to give the group a longer tour than usual. During it, he pointed out the symbol for man on the pulpit and mentioned there wasn’t a symbol for woman. Shar and Richard had both strongly opposed the ordination of women as priests and Jeffrey’s discovery intrigued them. After the tour, they stayed behind to ask Jeffrey additional questions. Before the group left, they colle
cted a “love offering” and gave it to Jeffrey, who had mentioned several times during the tour that he didn’t receive any salary from the church but instead relied on God to provide for him and his four children. The group gave him $400.
A few days after the group left, Bill Lord called Jeffrey into an office at the visitors’ center.
“You can’t ask for or accept money for giving tours,” Bill said. One of the parents who had been chaperoning the Memorial Day tour group had complained. “You’re going to have to turn that money over to the church.”
Jeffrey quickly apologized and turned over the money. But he asked Bill if it would be okay if the church used the money to buy paint and carpet for the house where he and Alice lived. “Bill agreed,” said Jeffrey, “so I got it anyway.” He ended up getting even more. When Richard Brand heard what had happened, he became upset and mailed Jeffrey a check for $620. Jeffrey didn’t tell anyone about it, but he did write down Richard’s name and address. He was someone Jeff planned to remember.
By June, Sharon was spending every free moment at the Lundgrens’. She ate all her meals there too. Jeffrey mentioned this one afternoon when it was time to buy groceries, and Sharon volunteered to turn over her salary of $500 per month to the family. It was added to the $1,600 per month that Kevin gave the Lundgrens. Although Jeffrey had been warned not to solicit donations, he still did. Jeffrey bragged to Kevin about the biggest gifts—$500 from one church group and $300 from another—but no one, not even Jeffrey, kept tabs of the ones, fives, and tens pressed into his hands after he gave a tour.
Sharon decided to stay in Kirtland when summer ended. Jeffrey had convinced her that it, not Independence, was the true site of Zion. She got a job at Holzheimer’s Grocery Store as a checkout clerk. The church agreed to let her continue to live in a tiny apartment near the temple that was normally reserved for student guides. But it began charging her rent. Sharon continued to turn over her paychecks to Jeffrey and Alice. In turn, Jeffrey promised to pay her bills and feed her. Danny, who had been baptized into the RLDS by Jeffrey in July, returned to art school but promised to come back to work as a guide the next summer.