by Pete Earley
“No one knew if they were on the list,” recalled Shar. “It became very divisive and competitive.”
Shar asked Jeffrey one day in private if she would make it. “You and Danny are two of the twelve,” Jeffrey assured her. Shar asked about Greg and Richard. Jeffrey wasn’t certain about Richard, but Greg was safe. Jeffrey then volunteered the names of three group members who were “expendable.”
“Kevin is definitely going to die,” Shar later quoted Jeffrey as saying. “Even if Kevin survived the takeover, Jeffrey was supposed to shoot him with a shotgun because Kevin was unclean and couldn’t be there when Christ returned.” Dennis and Tonya were also going to be killed by Jeffrey. “Jeffrey was going to tell the police that we had hostages,” Shar said. “He was going to kill Dennis and Tonya and Molly and throw their bodies off the roof of the temple to show the police that we were serious.”
Although Shar didn’t know it at the time, everyone who asked Jeffrey if they were among the lucky twelve were privately assured that they were safe. They were also told the name of someone who wasn’t going to survive. Jeffrey told Kevin that the Patricks were going to die. He told the Patricks that Kevin was going to die. Shar and Kevin commuted to their jobs in Cleveland each morning together. Most days, Shar slept while Kevin drove. But she was too nervous to sleep during February 1988. “I wanted to warn him, to tell him that he was going to be killed,” she explained. “But I was afraid too because if Jeff was who he said he was, then Jeffrey was only doing what God wanted him to do. I figured that God must want Kevin dead.”
Shar didn’t need to warn Kevin. He had figured it out on his own. “I had picked up several signals.” Still Kevin didn’t get really scared until he saw how Jeffrey reacted one day when he developed a kidney stone. Jeffrey was in tremendous pain, yet when it was time for the men to lift weights, he performed his normal workout. “Jeffrey always tried to claim that he was sort of a super human, that he was immortal,” Kevin said. “The fact that he had a kidney stone showed that he was no different from any other man.” But there was something else that bothered Kevin. Jeffrey had been in agony, yet it was so important for him to show off that he had endured the excruciating pain. “I realized just how important all this was to him—how important being a prophet had become. I also realized that he was drawing off our energies. Each time someone new came into the group, Jeffrey gained more confidence in himself. He figured that he was right, that he was a prophet. We were feeding off his fantasy and he was feeding off our fantasy and together we were creating an even bigger and bigger fantasy that was beginning to take on a life of its own.”
A few days after Jeffrey recovered from the kidney stone, he and Kevin bumped into each other in the kitchen. For a brief second, their eyes met. “It was strange, but at that very instant, we both knew,” said Kevin. “He knew that I no longer believed in him and I knew that he would not, could not, allow me to doubt him. He had too much to lose.”
On February 16, the group had a chocolate sheet cake for dessert after dinner.
“Whose birthday is it?” chirped Kristen Lundgren, then age nine.
Jeffrey looked at Kevin. “It’s Kevin’s going-away cake,” he said. Everyone laughed. Kevin had run off before and come back, so everyone assumed that Jeff was kidding him.
Kevin interpreted Jeffrey’s comment differently. “He was going to kill me.” The next morning, Kevin left for work as usual, but when he got there, he turned in his resignation and hurried to the bus station. Kevin had driven to work by himself that morning. Shar had taken a different job and no longer rode with him into Cleveland. Everyone at the farm wondered where Kevin was that night when he didn’t come home. Just before dinner, the phone rang. As always, Jeffrey answered it. A woman was on the line. She refused to give her name, but said that she was a friend of Kevin’s.
“The car is parked at the Cleveland bus station,” she said.
Jeffrey slammed down the receiver.
“That son of a bitch has run off,” Jeffrey swore and then, in front of Alice and Shar, he declared: “Kevin’s as good as dead. I’m going to track him down and kill him.”
Chapter 30
FOR three days, Jeffrey stormed around the farmhouse, openly discussing how he was going to kill Kevin. “He’s in Buffalo hiding. I could get up there and do him and be back overnight.” He telephoned Kevin’s mother but Kevin had already warned her not to tell Jeffrey where he was hiding. He telephoned the Veterans Administration hospital where Kevin had worked in Cleveland and the one in Buffalo too, but Kevin had not left a forwarding address. Jeffrey finally gave up. “Whether he dies at my hand or whether he dies because I say the prayer that raises the mountain and causes the earthquake really doesn’t matter,” Jeffrey told the group. “Kevin is dead to God.”
In March, Jeffrey learned that Bill and Eleanor Lord had resigned as tour guides and were moving out of the Sidney Rigdon house. He and Alice insisted on helping them move. Jeffrey’s group moved everything in one day. Bill was impressed. “It was swell.” It reminded the Lords of an old-fashioned barn raising where everyone got together to work hard and build a barn in one day. Jeffrey and Alice refused to accept any cash so Bill took everyone out to dinner. Jeffrey was happy. The Lords had moved far enough from the temple that he wouldn’t have to kill them.
By the first of April, the takeover permeated every conversation at the farm. Frequently, it was Alice who brought it up. As the “mother” of the family, Jeffrey had assigned her the job of taking care of the minor children during the temple takeover. Besides Jason, Kristen, and Caleb, she would have to watch the Luffs’ two children, and Molly Patrick. She was in charge of buying food for the takeover too. The family would need food between May 1, when they seized the temple, and May 3 when Christ appeared.
“What do you like to eat when you are under stress?” Alice asked Shar one afternoon.
“I don’t know,” Shar replied. “’Why?”
“Oh, I was thinking about the takeover. Isn’t this weird? I mean, what we’re talking about is the insurrection of a national historical monument!” During the next few minutes, Alice speculated about how long it would take the television cameras to arrive and whether the group would be on the national news. Would 60 Minutes do a segment on the family? Alice’s sister, Terri, had moved to Saudi Arabia with her husband. Alice wondered if the television stations in the Middle East would broadcast the story. “Everyone was getting geared up,” said Shar.
One night in mid-April, Jeffrey announced that he was not going to teach his regular class nor drill the group on various military procedures. Instead, he read a passage from the Book of Mormon. It was verses 1 through 47 in the Third Book of Nephi, chapter 5, which told how Jesus Christ had appeared to the ancient Hebrews in the New World after he had been crucified by the Jews.
. . . They cast their eyes up again towards heaven; and behold, they saw a man descending out of heaven. And he was clothed in a white robe, and he came down and stood in the midst of them . . . And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand, and spake unto the people, saying, Behold I am Jesus Christ, of whom the prophets testified should come into the world ...
By the time Jeffrey finished reading the verses, there were tears in his eyes. He had always lectured them against becoming emotional but Jeffrey couldn’t control himself—or so it seemed.
“This is what we can accomplish if we follow God’s words,” Jeffrey concluded, his voice cracking. “We can actually see Jesus Christ.’’ He paused and then said, “I am going to see Him. No one is going to keep me from it.”
That night, many of Jeffrey’s followers couldn’t sleep. A few went down to the kitchen and talked about what Jeffrey had said. The idea that they were going to meet Jesus Christ and become one of his chosen disciples, just like Matthew, John, and Peter, was so fantastic that it was difficult to grasp.
The group got a new member in April. It was Jeffrey’s cousin, Debbie Olivarez. Because she was from Jeffrey’s “b
loodline,” she didn’t need to undergo an orientation period as the Patricks had. “Understanding the pattern will be natural for her,” Jeffrey said. Debbie’s mother was Lois Lundgren’s sister, and as children, Debbie and Jeffrey had frequently played together. Debbie had always been her grandmother Gadberry’s favorite grandchild, a fact that had irked Jeffrey. But Debbie had fallen out of favor with the Gadberrys and the Lundgrens when she married John Olivarez in 1969 while still in high school. Debbie had thought that she was pregnant at the time. “I really didn’t love John when we got married,” Debbie later confided to Jeffrey. “But I felt so guilty about the sexual relationship that I was afraid no one else would want me. I felt like used merchandise.”
During the next eighteen years, Debbie and John appeared to be a perfect RLDS family. They were youth leaders in their local RLDS congregation, and John held a series of important church financial jobs. Together they had four children and Debbie became a registered nurse. The two of them eventually opened a family-run Mexican restaurant in Independence. But privately, Debbie was becoming disenchanted. She never had really fallen in love with John and she didn’t think that he loved her. When she confided in an RLDS marriage counselor, he told her that she was to blame. “I was the woman. If I would just do whatever my husband told me to do, then our marriage would be fine.” After Debbie left the counseling session, the priest called her husband and told him everything Debbie had said in confidence.
In November 1986, Debbie filed for divorce. When the divorce became final in March 1987, Debbie became despondent. She wrenched her back at work and was put on disability. She began going on shopping sprees to boost her spirits. By the fall of 1987, she was heavily in debt and suicidal. To help cheer her up, her grandparents asked Debbie to drive them to Kirtland to visit Jeffrey and Alice. “They had just moved to the farm and it was wonderful. I felt really at peace.” Debbie returned to Independence, but Jeffrey invited her back at Christmas and mailed her an airplane ticket.
“Deep down I had always been looking for a knight in shining armor to carry me away and Jeffrey convinced me that he could deliver that person to me,” Debbie recalled. “He had told me that he knew who my ‘true companion’ was. . . . He said, ‘You will never have a normal relationship unless I help you. You will never find the man that you want. I am the only one who can do that for you.’ I believed him and I wanted someone desperately to love and someone to desperately love me.”
Debbie returned to Independence, put her house up for sale, and told her parents that she was joining Jeffrey’s commune. Jeffrey helped Debbie find a job at a Cleveland hospital. Eleven days after she moved to the farm, she was working as a nurse and stealing medical supplies for use during the temple takeover. “It didn’t seem wrong. Everything Jeffrey said fit into place with the scriptures that he cited.”
Jeffrey told Debbie that Greg Winship was her true companion. They began dating. “I was happy,” Debbie said.
On April 22, Jeffrey went over the final details of the takeover. Everyone would arrive at the farmhouse on May 1. The men would dress in full camouflage military outfits, their faces painted black. They would hike through the apple orchard behind the farm and then follow a right-of-way owned by the electric power company to the back of the RLDS church property. They would split into two groups. Ron, Dennis, and Greg would break into the temple. Danny, Richard, Damon, and Jeffrey would go from house to house killing the occupants. They would capture the Luffman family and bring them to the temple. By that time, the women and children would be safely inside with the other men. Jeffrey would behead the Luffmans. He had already bought a machete and had practiced swinging it in front of the group. Jeffrey would say the secret prayer and the men would get ready for the inevitable shootout with the police. On May 3, the mountain of the Lord would rise up and Christ would appear and bless the twelve adults who had survived.
There was only one problem. Jeffrey wasn’t certain what year God wanted the temple taken over. The front doors listed only the month and day. Jeffrey told his followers that he would get up early in the morning and go to a hill where he would ask God to appear and tell him if this was the year. Everyone was nervous and tense.
When the Patricks left the farmhouse that night after attending Jeffrey’s class, Jeffrey called everyone back together. That included Ron and Susie, Greg, Debbie, Richard, Sharon, Danny, Damon, Shar, and Alice. “It was always understood that the Patricks would not make it,” Shar later testified. “Jeff always said that Dennis was jealous of Jeff, that he wanted to be in Jeff’s position, and that he was a doubter in Jeff’s power.”
On this particular night, Jeffrey added a new twist. He would kill Dennis once everyone was in the temple, he said, but God wanted someone else to murder Tonya and Molly. “Alice will do it,” Jeffrey said. She was required to kill to prove that she believed in Jeffrey. He had bought Alice a 9-millimeter pistol and taught her how to shoot it, he said.
“I looked at Alice,” Shar recalled later in court testimony, “because it kind of took me aback and she kind of sat back on the chair and rubbed her hand on the edge of the table and she said, ‘We all have to do what we have to do.’”
Chapter 31
KEVIN spent February and March in Buffalo hiding from Jeffrey. He stayed mostly with friends. Only his mother knew where he was and sometimes Kevin didn’t tell her. He’d simply call her for messages. When she told him that Jeffrey had telephoned, Kevin panicked. “Jeffrey was so much a part of my psyche,” Kevin later recalled, “that I was afraid he could anticipate my moves.”
Kevin hadn’t taken any of his belongings when he fled Cleveland. He hadn’t wanted to arouse suspicion at the farm by packing a suitcase. On the day that he escaped, he had telephoned a woman in Buffalo and asked her to buy him a bus ticket. By noon, Kevin was on his way out of town. He had less than five dollars in his pocket.
He was terrified at first. He couldn’t sleep. He started smoking, a habit he’d kicked. Whenever he went outside, he would scan the license plates of approaching cars. If the plate said Ohio, he panicked. Even after several uneventful weeks, Kevin remained scared. Finally, he decided to tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the temple takeover. He looked up the address in the telephone book and had a friend drop him off there.
“I didn’t even make it past the front lobby. An agent came out to interview me and I could tell from the questions he asked that he figured I was a nut case.”
Kevin couldn’t blame him. The agent didn’t know anything about Joseph Smith, Jr., the RLDS, or the Kirtland temple. Talk about beheadings, the Sword of Laban, and “redeeming the vineyard” sounded fantastic. After listening to Kevin’s story, the agent said that the takeover sounded like a “problem for the local authorities.” He then asked permission to take Kevin’s photograph. “He was more interested in investigating me than Jeffrey.”
Kevin hurried out of the FBI field office. He felt foolish. He decided to forget about tipping off the police. But he couldn’t shake the image of Jeffrey lifting weights even though he had a kidney stone. “I knew he was going to kill someone.” Kevin dialed information and scribbled down the number for the Kirtland Police Department. Maybe there he could find someone willing to take him seriously.
April 28, 1988, was a mundane day for Kirtland Police Chief Dennis T. Yarborough and that was exactly how the forty-three-year-old, slightly balding, tobacco-chewing chief liked them. “Cops generally start working in a small city police department and then go up the ladder until they land some high-paying, big federal-agency job,” Yarborough later explained. His twenty-three-year career had taken the opposite track. Yarborough started at the top—as a plain-clothes army security officer stationed at the White House in 1965. Four years later, he moved to Pennsylvania as a state-highway trooper. Next came a six-year stint with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, whose jurisdiction included the Cleveland area. Finally in 1979, Yarborough was named chief of the six-officer Kirtland Police Departmen
t. From national, to state, to county, to city: to Yarborough, being police chief of a tiny town was the best possible job. There were two types of law. Hands-on-the-hood, spread-your-legs, I’m-bustin’-your-ass big-city law, where a cop made a name for himself by racking up “collars,” and what Yarborough liked to describe as down-home “heartbeat” law, as in “You get so close to your people that you can hear their hearts beating.” That was the sort of law that Dennis Yarborough practiced.
There had been only one murder in Kirtland since 1979. In 1987, a total of 91 serious crimes were reported. That was an average of 7.5 crimes per month, about one serious crime every four days. Most of them were not major by big-city standards. Sixty-three of the crimes were thefts, such as stolen bicycles and missing tools from construction sites. Not a single armed robbery. Not a single bank robbery. Not a single arrest related to illegal drugs. There were only five, count ‘em, five, burglaries in the entire city during the entire year.
Still, Yarborough and his officers kept busy. Much of what Yarborough did as chief didn’t fit into a statistical breakdown. It wasn’t unusual for a drunk to rap on Yarborough’s bedroom window at 3:00 A. M. looking for a ride home or for frantic parents to call and demand that Yarborough find their wayward teenager who was still carousing on the streets.
There were two reasons why Yarborough had applied for the chief’s job. The first was his wife, Gail. Her family could trace itself back to the founders of Kirtland and she had never wanted to live nor been happy living anywhere else. She and Yarborough had met in sixth grade, had fallen in love in seventh, and had never been interested in dating anyone else. In high school, she was the band’s majorette. He was the scrappy quarterback of the Kirtland Fighting Hornets football team, good enough to get four scholarship offers from small colleges. Yarborough chose Kent State University instead, but eventually dropped out and joined the army. He and Gail married when they were both twenty. Gail came back sixteen times that first year to visit her folks in Kirtland. It was the first time she had been away from home and she hated living in suburban Washington, D.C. It was Gail who eventually got him to apply to be police chief. Gail worked as a secretary at the high school. She knew everyone in town. On most Sundays, her parents came for supper.