by Pete Earley
Dennis Patrick, Susie Luff, and Dennis and Cheryl Avery received the most “sessions” from Jeffrey—and Alice. “The slightest little mistake would evolve into a whole big example of sin,” said Ron. “This was continuous and basically what that evolved into was that people were taught that they couldn’t do anything right.” Jeffrey would tell someone to do a task and then chastise them for not doing it the way that he would have.
“But you didn’t tell us how to do it,” a group member would respond.
“You should have known without asking,” Jeffrey would reply.
There was only one correct answer to any question, Ron said. “You had to become one heart and one mind with Jeffrey.”
One night everyone was eating dinner at the farm and talking about the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, when Susie announced: “I’d like to meet a prophet face-to-face.” For several seconds everyone was quiet. Susie was sitting across from Jeffrey.
“Susie,” Alice replied, “you wouldn’t know a prophet if he was sitting across the table from you.” Everyone laughed. Susie didn’t understand. But Ron did.
“It took some time and it took the classes to do it,” he later told investigators, “but I came to believe . . . that Jeff was the seer of the last days, the one that Malachi speaks of . . . he was the prophet of the last days who had come to prepare the way for Christ’s return.”
Everyone worked at the farm except for Jeffrey and Alice. Prophets were forbidden by God to have regular jobs because that would require them to submit to another human being, Alice told the group. “Prophets only answer to God.”
“Alice didn’t have to work either,” said Shar, “because she was the wife of the prophet.”
Richard had gotten a $22,400-per-year job as a civil engineer in a nearby town. Kevin collected about $18,000 annually as a clerk at a Veterans Administration hospital near Cleveland. Sharon earned minimum wage as a cashier at a convenience store. Shar got a job as a clerk at the Makro Department Store. Danny framed pictures at Gallup’s Fine Art store. Dennis Patrick worked first at Scandinavian Health Spa and later at Chemical Financial Corporation, earning $20,850 annually. Greg earned $20,275 yearly as an accountant at Astro Travel Service. Ron operated a forklift at Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, earning $17,630 per year. Investigators would later estimate that Jeffrey and Alice were collecting between $1,500 to $2,000 per week from their followers. Jeffrey was supposed to use the income to pay everyone’s bills, but he didn’t. No one but Jeffrey knew how the money was being spent. The Averys were the only ones not making weekly contributions. That was because Dennis had already given Jeffrey $10,000 and because Dennis and Cheryl were now broke. Dennis had held a slew of low- paying jobs since moving to Kirtland, but none paid more than minimum wage and the family was forced to apply for food stamps.
Whenever anyone wanted money, they had to ask Jeffrey, and Shar discovered that he was tightfisted when it came to everyone’s needs except his and Alice’s. The Patricks were told that there was no money for such frivolous expenses as buying a pizza on Friday night. Yet, at least once a week, Jeffrey would announce that he and Alice needed some time alone and they would go out to dinner and to a movie. If Alice didn’t like what was being fixed for supper, she would send Jeffrey for a shrimp party platter from the local Red Lobster and the two of them would gorge themselves in their bedroom.
Everyone who lived in the farmhouse, except Alice, had chores. Shar was supposed to dust the hardwood floors downstairs once a week, do everyone’s laundry, clean the refrigerator and stove. Sharon cleaned the upstairs and was responsible for picking up the four Lundgren children’s clothing, making their beds, and tidying their rooms. Richard took care of the trash, Danny cleaned the bathrooms, Kevin helped cook. Even Tonya and Susie, who didn’t live at the farmhouse, were expected to come every Saturday and help clean. “Alice mostly slept,” Shar recalled. Jeffrey began referring to the women at the farm as “Alice’s handmaidens.”
Despite the inequalities, no one complained. All of them believed in the pattern. All of them believed in Jeffrey. All of them thought that he was a prophet.
At first Jeffrey seemed content at the farm, but his mood soon changed. He began complaining to Alice about how the RLDS had treated him, how unfair it was that a “fool” like Dale Luffman was recognized as a minister while God’s “last messenger” remained anonymous, how he was once again forced to resign from a job. “Jeffrey missed giving tours,” said Alice. “He was used to having fundamentalists seek him out for advice.” At the farm, no one came to the door to take his picture, no one slipped hundred-dollar bills into his hand, no one remarked about how much he resembled Joseph Smith, Jr. Jeffrey had once talked about overthrowing Wallace B. Smith. Now he spent his mornings building hutches for the rabbits that the group had decided to raise.
Less than two weeks after moving to the farm, Jeffrey announced that he had found a startling message in the scriptures. He had been studying the “parable of the vineyard” when he had come across this line:
. . . the lord of the vineyard said unto one of his servants . .
Jeffrey reminded the class that the “lord of the vineyard” was God. He then pointed out that he—Jeffrey—was “one of his [God’s] servants.” Obviously, he said, the parable contained a hidden message “to me from God.”
To learn what this secret instruction was, Jeffrey had used the pattern to divide the parable. He had done this by putting the words that came directly before “the lord of the vineyard” at the top of his diagram and those that came directly after that phrase at the bottom. This is what he wrote.
[A] saved my vineyard from
[B] the hands of the destroyer
[C] and the lord of the vineyard
[B] said unto one of his servants
[A] Go, and gather together the residue of my servants
When he did this, Jeffrey discovered that the word “servant” was synonymous with the words “the destroyer” because they were both on [B] lines and mirrored each other.
“God is giving me a new name and a new job,” Jeffrey declared. “Besides being the last messenger, I am now to be called ‘the destroyer.’ People will die at my hands.”
Whom did God want him to destroy? Jeffrey asked rhetorically.
The answer was in the [A] lines. Jeffrey explained that God wanted him to gather “the residue of my servants”—a symbolic reference to Jeffrey’s followers—and with them, he was to cleanse the vineyard until it was “saved.”
“The enemies that I am to destroy are the persons now in control of the vineyard,” Jeffrey said. He then quickly reminded his followers that the vineyard was symbolic of the Kirtland temple.
“Dale Luffman and the RLDS Church are the enemy,” he said. “They are the wicked who have seized control of the vineyard.”
Jeffrey opened his scriptures and read several lines of the parable aloud to the class. He was visibly excited and his voice rose as he spoke: “Go ye straightway unto the land of my vineyard. And redeem my vineyard, for it is mine . . . avenge me of mine enemies.”
Jeffrey slapped shut his book. “Ladies and gentlemen, God is commanding us to take over the Kirtland temple. I am the destroyer. We must destroy the wicked who are now in control of the temple if we want Christ to return.
“And that is exactly what I intend to do.”
Jeffrey had not only found a way to take revenge on Dale Luffman but he had come up with an idea that was bound to make him famous once again.
Chapter 29
JEFFREY to prepare his followers for the takeover of the Kirtland temple. He began by bringing home war movies. First Blood, the story of John Rambo, a Vietnam veteran who took on an entire town’s police force single-handedly and won, was one of the first that he rented. Next came Apocalypse Now. Jeffrey canceled class so that everyone could watch it. When it ended, Jeffrey rewound the videotape and started it over. He watched it four times in a row. The next night he canceled class again. Th
is time, he shared his experiences in Vietnam with the group. He said he had participated in covert missions in enemy territory. He’d killed untold numbers of Vietcong both with his rifle and in hand-to-hand combat. He’d cut off the ears of some as souvenirs. He was so deadly that his peers nicknamed him “killer.”
“Jeffrey convinced us that if a policeman was holding one of us as a shield, all we had to do was stand perfectly still and Jeffrey could shoot him between the eyes,” recalled Shar. ‘”It might make you deaf for a while,’ he told us, ‘but otherwise you’ll be okay.”’
When Jeffrey resumed teaching his nightly classes, he fed his followers a steady fare of violence from the Book of Mormon and the Bible. He talked about how Jael, in chapter 4 of the Old Testament book of Judges, had pounded a tent stake through the head of Sisera as he was sleeping. He recalled how Moses had murdered an Egyptian, how Nephi had slain Laban, and then Jeffrey read everyone the story of the prophet Jacob in the Book of Mormon. Jacob was preaching when his enemy, Sherem, demanded proof that Christ had risen from the dead. Jacob said there was only one way to convince a skeptic such as Sherem and that was by asking God to strike him dead. And that, according to the Mormon scriptures, is what God did.
“God was not afraid to kill,” Jeffrey pointed out.
He then reminded everyone how God had ordered him in Section 38 to “go to the Ohio ... and there you shall be endowed with power from on high.”
“How am I supposed to receive this power?” Jeffrey asked. Before anyone could answer, Jeffrey referred to the murder of Sherem. “When God wanted to show that He had power, God killed the wicked. If I want to show that I have God’s power, if I want to be endowed with that power, then I must kill the wicked.”
“I had always believed in the scriptures,” said Dennis Patrick. “They couldn’t be wrong and everything Jeffrey showed us came directly out of the scriptures.”
Just before Christmas, Jeffrey began revealing in class specifics about how he would take over the Kirtland temple. As he did with everything, Jeffrey tied the temple takeover to the return of Jesus Christ. He said that Christ could only return if there was no wickedness in or near the temple. That meant every man, woman, and child who lived within a one-block radius of the temple, some twenty-five people, would have to be executed. This would include Bill and Eleanor Lord. The only family who would not be murdered during the first step of the takeover was Dale Luffman’s. Luffman, his wife, Judy, and their three children, ages thirteen, ten, and five, would be bound and gagged and brought into the temple where they would be taken before Jeffrey. After reading several scriptures, Jeffrey would offer the Luffman family to God as a human sacrifice. He would then behead all five of them, beginning with Luffman and moving down the line. In Moses’ day, the Jews made sacrifices to God to atone for their sins. Because Christ had not yet returned, Jeffrey claimed that he and his followers were still living under the same laws as Moses. Therefore, the Luffmans would serve as the blood-atonement offering from Jeffrey. They represented the wicked who had seized “the vineyard.” Their blood would be spilled to “cleanse it.”
Cutting off their heads was also scriptural, Jeffrey taught. Nephi had beheaded Laban, and Conner Macleod, the hero in The Highlander, had used his sword to behead his opponents. Obviously, the scriptures didn’t actually mention Conner Macleod, but Jeffrey claimed that God had inspired the makers of the movie and that was good enough. After all, the Mormon scriptures said that the glory of God was intelligence. “What better way to cut off a man from God than to sever his head from his body,” Jeffrey asked, “making it impossible for him to use his intelligence?”
Once the Luffmans were sacrificed, Jeffrey would chant a secret prayer that would cause “the mountain of the Lord,” as described in Isaiah, to rise up. A great earthquake would then erupt and everyone living in Kirtland would be killed. Only the people inside the temple would be spared. Christ would appear and the Millennium would begin. Jeffrey and his followers would be Christ’s new disciples.
Alice was the first to hear Jeffrey’s entire plan. She would testify later that she didn’t believe he was serious. She became even more suspicious when she surprised Jeffrey one morning while everyone else who lived at the farm was at work. Jeffrey was reading military manuals. After he read a page, he would rip it out and burn it in the fireplace, she said. “I couldn’t figure out why he was destroying the book until later that night at class. He taught the military stuff like it was all his idea.”
Jeffrey also changed the way that he taught. He had always encouraged his followers to read along with him when he quoted scripture. But now he ordered them to close their books. “Jeffrey kept his open,” said Alice. “I was sitting right next to him and could see what he was doing. He acted like he was reading a verse from one book, but I could see that he was taking a verse from one book and a verse from another book of scripture and combining them. He was making up his own scriptures.”
Alice confronted Jeffrey when they were alone in their bedroom that night. “I said, ‘Since when do we start taking things out of context, Jeffrey?,’ and he said, ‘What’ya mean?,’ and I said, ‘Now, Jeffrey, this is Alice you’re talking to and I saw what you did. You were mixing and matching those verses.’”
Jeffrey exploded in a rage, she said. “He said, ‘You shut up about this. You shut up.’ He started to shake me. . . . I think that’s when I first began to see that Jeffrey was a con man. I believed that he was giving everyone a line of baloney and I decided the temple takeover stuff was bullshit.”
If Alice felt that Jeffrey was, as she said, a “con man,” she kept quiet about it. “There was never any expression of unbelief on Alice’s part,” Kevin later said. If anything, Alice became Jeffrey’s cheerleader. The two of them reminded Kevin of a tag team in professional wrestling. Jeffrey would declare the “word of the Lord” in a class and then Alice would “rush in and convince everyone that what Jeffrey was saying was the truth.”
One night when Shar and Alice were alone, Shar asked her if Jeffrey was serious about killing the Luffmans and taking over the temple. “Alice looked right at me,” Shar recalled. “She said, ‘Jeffrey is dead serious. If he says he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it.”’ And then Alice added another statement that stuck in Shar’s mind. “You’ve got to understand,” Alice said. “I’m not only putting my life on the line here, but I’ve put my children’s life on the line for this. Jeffrey is a prophet. He is who he says he is. You’ve got to believe it and so do I. I’ve got to.”
Jeffrey assigned everyone tasks. Richard was told to get copies of city maps that showed where gas and other power lines were located. Danny built a replica of the temple and the houses around it and put numbers on the ones where people were to be executed. Since Dennis Patrick lived less than one block from the police station, he was told to watch it and record when the officers changed shifts. Sharon compiled a list of area gasoline stations. Jeffrey said that he might blow one up to create a diversion. The women in the group were shown different bullets and told that they would have to learn to identify them by touch in case they needed to load the men’s weapons at night. Shar and Tonya practiced in a room with all the lights off. Jeffrey gave every man a code name. He called himself Eagle-One because, as he put it, “I am in charge and my eyesight is as good as an eagle’s.” His son Damon, now age seventeen, was Eagle-Two. Danny was Eagle-Eye; Richard, Talon-One; Dennis Patrick, Talon-Two; Ron, Falcon-One; Greg, Falcon-Two. The family farmhouse was dubbed “Eagle’s Nest.” The red barn was “Red Eagle.” The temple was “Eagle’s Mound.”
No one would later remember what Dennis Avery was called. It simply didn’t matter. Dennis and Cheryl still came to classes, but only about once a week. Dennis was working as a night watchman for Wackenhut Security and it was difficult for him to attend at night. Cheryl didn’t feel comfortable leaving her three daughters home alone, even though the oldest was thirteen. “The Averys are so stupid,” Jeffrey told the class on
e night, “that the first they will know about the temple takeover is when they see us on television inside the temple.”
In February 1988, Jeffrey revealed that he had found the secret prayer that he was required to say in order to make the “mountain of the Lord” rise. God had hidden it in Isaiah, chapter 57, verses 13 and 14. Everyone scrambled to their Bibles. Jeffrey said the key words were “cast ye up, cast ye up.”
“Why are those words repeated?” he asked. “Because that is how God talks.”
A few days later, Jeffrey made another exciting announcement. God had given him a specific date to attack the temple. “He told me it was posted somewhere in the temple,” he explained, “so I went to find it. I looked everywhere and then God’s wisdom came to me. If you go to see a doctor, how do you know when he will be in his office? You know by looking at the front door because that is where a doctor posts his office hours.” Jeffrey grinned. “God has done the exact same thing. He posted the date that His temple will be redeemed right on the front doors.”
The temple doors were decorated with five circles: two large ones and three small ones. The two big circles were symbolic of the second month in the Jewish calendar, Jeffrey said. The three small ones represented days. “God is telling us that He wants us to take over the temple on May third.”
Jeffrey asked if anyone knew why that date was significant. Only Alice did.
“May third is Jeffrey’s birthday,” she volunteered. That was another sign, Jeffrey solemnly declared, that proved he was God’s last messenger.
It soon seemed that Jeffrey was having almost daily revelations from God about the takeover. Everyone in the group was getting excited. One night, Jeffrey announced that God wanted them to actually take over the temple on May 1, and then hold the police at bay until May 3 when Christ would appear. “We are going to have a shootout with the police,” he said. The next day, Jeffrey showed the group six gas masks that he had bought to use if the police fired tear gas into the temple. But none of Jeffrey’s revelations caused as much panic as when he announced that only twelve members of his group were going to survive the shootout and actually be there when Christ appeared. There could be only twelve, Jeffrey said, because Christ had had only twelve disciples when He was alive. Jeffrey, Alice, and Damon were guaranteed safe passage. But only nine of the remaining adults would make it. That meant four of them were going to be killed.