by Pete Earley
At least once each week, Jeffrey taught a scripture class to members of his group. They included Richard, Sharon, Danny, Greg, Dennis Patrick, Tonya, Dennis Avery, Cheryl, Alice, and, on most occasions, Damon Lundgren, who was now sixteen. Jeffrey told them that they had to “erase everything” from their minds about religion.
“This is not my rule,” Jeffrey explained, “it is what God is commanding you to do!”
Jeffrey told the group to open their Mormon scriptures to Section 90 in the Doctrine and Covenants, a record of a revelation that Joseph Smith, Jr., purportedly received from God on May 6, 1833.
Jeffrey read part of it to them:
“... [the] wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience, from the children of men, and because of the tradition of their fathers. But I have commanded you to bring up your children in light and truth.”
He then diagramed the verse:
[A] [the] wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth
[Bl through disobedience from the children of men
[C] and because of the tradition of their fathers.
[B] But I have commanded you to bring up your children
[A] in light and truth
Lines [A] were parallel because they both contained the words “light and truth,” he said. Lines [B] mirrored each other because they had the word “children” in them. Line [C] stood alone. It was the “secret” chiastic line.
“God says light and truth are taken away because of the ‘tradition of their fathers,”’ Jeffrey explained. These traditions, he continued, were everything the RLDS had taught them. “You must get Satan’s garbage out of your memory banks,” he said. “I will teach you what to think, what to believe.”
Dennis would later recall Jeffrey’s presentations with a certain awe. “He was very calculated and extremely effective. Jeffrey never said anything without having scriptures to back it up and he would explain each verse and build on each verse, piece by piece, until he had constructed an elaborate foundation and proven his point. It was difficult to challenge him because when he got through, it didn’t seem like he was telling you to do something—it seemed like God was telling you to do it based on the scriptures.”
Dennis noticed something else about Jeffrey’s classes. Everyone had to agree with Jeffrey. If they didn’t, they were criticized. “He would use the pattern to tell us what a scripture actually said and then ask us if we could see it. If anyone didn’t see it, he would go over it again and again and again, until everyone in the room finally agreed with what he said.”
One night, Jeffrey marched into class and barked out an order. “Open your Bibles to Malachi.” He read the first verse of chapter 3 aloud to the group:
“Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me; and the Lord whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple ...”
That verse, Jeffrey lectured, contained an extraordinary secret. “It tells us that Christ ‘shall suddenly come to his temple.”’ Where, Jeffrey asked, is this temple? And then he quickly answered his own question. “The temple is in Kirtland.” And who has God sent to the temple? Again, he answered his own question. “The messenger who is preparing the way.” How, Jeffrey continued, would this messenger prepare the way? This time, Jeffrey paused before answering. The last messenger, Jeffrey said, was sent by God to reveal the pattern to the world. That was how members of the group could identify him. The messenger was the person teaching the pattern.
Dennis snapped. “Jeffrey was telling us that he was the last messenger .”
After several weeks of classes, Dennis and Tonya finally began to feel that they were being accepted by the others in the group. On a late summer night, Jeffrey came to their apartment. He wanted them to join the “family.” The Lundgrens called their own children the “naturals,” he explained. Richard, Greg, Sharon, and Danny were the “unnaturals.” Everyone in the “family” called Alice and Jeffrey “Mom and Dad.” Before Dennis and Tonya could become one of the unnaturals, however, there was something they had to do. Jeffrey opened his Bible to the New Testament book of Acts and read them chapter 4, verse 32, which describes how the early Christians lived communally with “all things in common.”
If the Patricks wanted to become part of the family, then Dennis was going to have to turn over to Jeffrey the paycheck that he got each week from working at a local health spa.
“I want you to submit a monthly budget to me,” Jeffrey said. “I will decide how much money you need.”
Jeffrey then asked Dennis what he had done with the cash that he’d received from selling his house in Independence. Most of it had gone to pay bills, Dennis replied.
“Jeffrey got angry and told me that I had wasted the money. He said I should have given it to him instead of paying off a bunch of Gentiles. He was the one who was going to build Zion. . . . Gentiles didn’t matter. The only reason why God had put them on earth was so we could use them.’’
Dennis and Tonya agreed to give Jeffrey all of their cash and future earnings. “We felt we were going to build Zion and we wanted to do our part,” said Dennis. “I was willing to do whatever it took to do this right and see Christ.”
Before he left, Jeffrey read Dennis and Tonya another story from the Bible. This one was from chapter 5 in Acts, which describes how Ananias and Sapphira, an early Christian couple, held back some of their possessions from the communal pot. When the apostle Peter questioned them about it, both lied and were immediately struck dead by God. Dennis and Tonya got the point.
Now that the Patricks were part of the family, they were invited to the Lundgrens’ house for scripture classes much more often than once a week. They were also privy to the private going-ons of the group. Both of them discovered that Jeffrey not only controlled the family’s money, but also directed their personal lives as well.
Jeffrey claimed that all of his followers’ names were hidden in the scriptures, just as his was, along with the names of their “true companions”—the spouses that God had created specifically for them. It was this claim that had helped convince Greg Winship that he should file for divorce and move to Kirtland to find the woman who, Jeffrey claimed, had been made from “flesh of his flesh.” As soon as Greg had gotten settled, he had asked about the name of his future spouse.
“I’m still looking for yours,” Jeffrey said, “but I have found the names of others.”
Greg asked him who? But Jeffrey wouldn’t say. Alice did. One afternoon, she took Sharon aside.
“Jeff and I were wondering if Richard isn’t the one for you,” she told her.
“Yeah,” Sharon replied, “I was wondering the same thing.”
Sharon was pleased to be matched with Richard, but he was not enthused when he heard what Alice had said. Although Sharon had gone on a diet and lost several pounds, she still was chunky. Richard was used to dating striking, slender, stylish women. Sharon was plain. As always, Jeffrey would later tell his followers that he really had nothing to do with matching Richard and Sharon. It was God who had ordered them to become married.
“I looked in the scriptures and they were clear about it,” he said. “Sharon was flesh of Richard’s flesh.”
But the timing of the match happened to coincide with a conversation between Richard and Jeffrey that had irritated the “father” of the family. Richard had poked fun at Jeffrey one afternoon while the two men were lifting weights by pointing out how pudgy he was getting. “Richard had an aversion to fat,” Jeffrey later said, “and my physical shape bothered him. Sometimes my weight would get up to two hundred and seventy pounds and I’d have a tummy on me. That was repulsive to Richard.” As soon as the men finished lifting weights, Jeffrey hurried inside and grabbed his scriptures.
“God is fat,” he declared. He showed Richard several verses that described God as being “heavy” and “stout.” “Those words are synonymous with fat,” Jeffrey insisted. “God has a stomach on him.” Richard had laughed.
It was shortly after that exchange that Richard was matched to Sharon. While Jeffrey later denied that there was any connection between the two events, the irony of matching a “pretty boy” with Sharon did cause him to smile. Perhaps God, he later quipped, had wanted to teach Richard a lesson.
Although Richard did not find Sharon attractive, Jeffrey ordered him to begin courting her, and Richard complied.
At about this same time, Jeffrey announced that Dennis and Cheryl Avery were going through their money much too quickly. Everyone in the family knew that the Averys were never going to be fully accepted. Like the Gentiles, they were being provided by God, Jeffrey said, for the group to use. Jeffrey decided that he was going to have a special class specifically designed to get the Averys’ cash. He and Alice would do most of the talking. The unnaturals would do their part by agreeing with everything they said and pressuring Dennis and Cheryl to turn over the proceeds from the sale of their house. No one balked at the idea.
On the night of the special class, Jeffrey quoted the same scriptures that he had used on the Patricks. Others in the group explained how much they were contributing to the communal pot. On June 27, Dennis Avery came to see Jeffrey. He and Cheryl had decided to give Jeffrey a check. They wanted to be “of one heart and of one soul” with everyone else. In return, Jeffrey promised to pay their rent. Dennis took out his checkbook and began to write, but Jeffrey stopped him. “Make it out to cash, not to me,” he said. He did not want the Internal Revenue Service asking about the income. Dennis wrote in an amount and showed it to Jeffrey for his approval. Jeffrey nodded and sent him to a nearby bank. When Dennis returned, he gave Jeffrey an envelope filled with bills. It was $10,000. Jeffrey thanked Dennis and sent him home.
Chapter 26
WITHIN an hour after Dennis handed him $10,000 in cash, Jeffrey was at Veith Sports Supply buying a .45-caliber lnterarms semi- automatic pistol. From there, he drove to Pistol Pete’s, another Ohio sporting goods store, and bought a .243-caliber Ruger hunting rifle and another .45-caliber Colt semi-automatic pistol. He waited one week and then returned to Pistol Pete’s and bought a Ruger .44- caliber magnum handgun. During the next few days, Jeffrey bought camouflage clothing, tents, camping supplies, canned food, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Jeffrey was stockpiling weapons and supplies for his “storehouse.” Many saints believed in keeping a one- year supply of food and other goods needed for survival during the last days of tribulation. According the Book of Revelation, the world would be stricken with famine, disease, and wars shortly before Jesus Christ returned. Jeffrey was going to be prepared. By the end of June, Jeffrey had added another Mini-14 Ruger assault rifle to his cache. He now had enough guns to arm all the men in his family. Richard already owned his own guns. Danny, Greg, Dennis Patrick, and Damon were issued weapons that Jeffrey had bought.
During the summer of 1987, Jeffrey and his group came to focus during their scriptural classes on one of Joseph Smith, Jr.’s best-known revelations. It had to do with the persecution of saints and the “redemption” of Zion. In November 1833, an angry mob beat and tarred and feathered several Mormon elders in Independence. The mob then forced dozens of Mormon settlers at gunpoint to leave the county. The saints’ homes were looted and their property was seized. When word of the attack reached Kirtland, Joseph Smith, Jr., was outraged. He announced that God had given him a revelation, which was later recorded as Section 98 in the Doctrine and Covenants. According to it, God had commanded his saints to “redeem Zion,” which, Smith said, meant that they were supposed to launch an armed attack on the Gentiles in Independence. Smith used the revelation to whip up support, and in May 1834, he set off for Missouri with two hundred armed men. He called his army “Zion’s Camp.” Church historians would later claim that Smith hoped that this show of force would intimidate the Gentiles, but when his band arrived at the Jackson County line, it was met by a much larger group of armed Missourians. Rather than fight, Smith appealed to state officials to avoid bloodshed by compensating the Mormons for the land and property that had been stolen from them. The governor ignored Smith’s request and the two-armed camps faced off in a stalemate. When cholera swept through the ill-prepared Mormon troops, the prophet was forced to retreat to Kirtland with little to show for his effort.
Jeffrey told his followers that Section 98 had been misinterpreted by Smith and the RLDS Church. It actually had nothing to do with the 1833 attack on Mormons. Rather, the revelation contained secret instructions from God to Jeffrey and his followers. These instructions were concealed in a part of the revelation known as the “parable of the vineyard.”
Joseph Smith, Jr., had claimed that God told him this parable. It was about a rich nobleman who was once given a choice spot of land to use as a vineyard. He sent his servants to plant olive trees on the property and he sent watchmen to build a lookout tower there and also construct a wall around the vineyard to protect it from attack. The watchmen built the tower, but they decided that there wasn’t any need for them to put up a wall so they ignored the nobleman’s orders. One night, an enemy attacked, plundered the vineyard, and destroyed the lookout tower. When the nobleman heard what had happened, he sent his warriors to reclaim the vineyard and take revenge.
Smith had said the parable was an example of what can happen when the saints didn’t follow orders from God [the nobleman in the parable]. But Jeffrey put an entirely different spin on the story. He diagramed each sentence in the parable and then revealed the “secret” messages that they contained. According to Jeffrey, the vineyard in the parable was actually Kirtland, the lookout tower was the Kirtland temple, and God was ordering Jeffrey’s followers to guard the temple.
“I am the last messenger that God has sent to the Kirtland temple to prepare the way for Christ’s return,” Jeffrey reiterated, “and the reason why He has called you here is because you are going to help me protect it.”
Jeffrey told his followers that major earthquakes would erupt during the final days before Christ returned and a huge mountain would rise up underneath the Kirtland temple, lifting it into the sky. This was based on Jeffrey’s interpretation of verses 2 and 3 in chapter 2 of Isaiah. Jeffrey read the crucial lines to his followers:
“And it shall come to pass in the last days, when the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established . . . all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord . . .”
Once the temple was raised on this mountain, Satan’s armies would swarm to Ohio in a final attempt to destroy the temple, kill the “last messenger” and thereby prevent Christ from returning to earth, he said. Jeffrey and his band would be waiting on the mountain for the onslaught.
“We will not have electricity. We won’t have houses. We will have to live off the land and we will have to protect the temple by whatever means possible until Christ shows up.” That was why Jeffrey was buying tents, food, and military-style weapons.
“When the armies of Satan come against us,” Jeffrey preached, “when they come to kill me and to kill you, we must be ready to fight and to die. We must be ready to shed blood.
“And,” he added, “there will be lots of it spilled—lots and lots of it.”
It sounded gallant and everyone agreed. If they were going to have to kill in order to protect the temple, then they would do just that.
Chapter 27
IN the late spring of 1987 while Jeffrey was preparing his followers for Armageddon, Tom Miller was reaching some conclusions of his own about what the scriptures said and what the RLDS Church espoused. “Everything we have been taught and everything I understood is completely false,” Tom announced one morning to Jeffrey while they both were at work in the visitors’ center. “I have come to the understanding that the RLDS is a church of men. There is a church of God, but to my knowledge it doesn’t exist on earth as I perceive it to be defined in the scriptures.”
Jeffrey agreed with him.
“Then why don’t we walk
out together?” Miller suddenly suggested. “I’m going to resign right now. Why don’t you go with me? We’ll go over to Dale Luffman’s office and both quit.”
Jeffrey declined.
Miller pressed him. “Why stay on if you don’t believe any of this? Why preach lies?”
“I’m not preaching lies,” Jeffrey replied, “because I’m not teaching what the RLDS is putting out. I’m teaching the truth.” Jeffrey still planned to someday lead a fundamentalist revolt. He would restore the truth to God’s “only true church.”
“Sure,” Miller retorted. Later when he recalled their conversation, Miller said: “I knew enough about what Jeff was teaching to know that it was erratic and illogical and not consistent with the scriptures. The reason Jeffrey didn’t want to resign was because he was all puffed up about teaching his Sunday school class and he had these followers. He liked feeling important.”
Miller marched across the street and tossed his priesthood card on Luffman’s desk. “I told him that I had no time for him, no time for the church....” Luffman was not sorry to see Tom Miller go. He had been part of the group of troublemakers. By June 1987, Luffman had been the stake president for eighteen months, but he still hadn’t been able to get rid of Jeffrey nor quiet the growing feud that was splitting the congregation. If anything, Luffman was losing. The adult Sunday school class that Jeffrey taught had become an ironclad stronghold for dissidents. Not everyone in the class felt comfortable with Jeffrey’s constant harping about chiasmus. But the presence of Jeffrey’s group—Richard, Greg, Danny, Sharon, the Patricks, and the Averys—each Sunday stifled all debate. Even Bill and Eleanor Lord were beginning to feel intimidated.
In July, Luffman felt the conflict had become, in his words, “almost demonic.” He decided to confront his critics head-on. On Sunday morning, he walked into Jeffrey’s class and made a fifteen- minute plea for peace. “I want to appeal to you to join the body of Christ,” he said. He talked about the need for the congregation to come together and said that it was wrong for one clique to believe it had “higher or more important knowledge” than anyone else. He complained about members who boycotted the worship service and he berated those closest to Jeffrey who had not made any effort to participate in church functions. When he finished, Luffman expected a rebuttal from Jeffrey or someone in the class. But no one said anything.