Prophet of Death_The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings

by Pete Earley

  There was no way for Shar to move everything that morning but she didn’t want to spend another night at the farmhouse. A waitress at work said she could live with her until she found her own apartment. Shar drove to the farm the next day in a small U-Haul truck to collect her belongings. Jeffrey and Danny carried Shar’s furniture from the farmhouse. Neither spoke to her. When the U-Haul was packed, Jeffrey stepped up to Shar.

  “You know what your problem is, Shar?” he said. “You have a real problem being submissive to men.”

  “Show me a man,” Shar shot back, “worth being submissive to.”

  As Shar drove away, Jeffrey decided that Alice had been right.

  “What Shar needed,” he said later, “was a man to give her a good fuck.”

  Chapter 33

  SHAR’S departure threatened Jeffrey. He knew it. So did Alice. Shar hadn’t fled in fear like Kevin. She’d simply walked out and Jeffrey hadn’t been able to stop her. Worse, Jeffrey had prophesied that Shar and Danny were going to be married and that Shar was going to be one of Christ’s twelve disciples during the Millennium. If that was true, why had she gone?

  No one in the group had said anything, of course, but Alice figured it would only be a matter of time before others began doubting Jeffrey. There were plenty of warning signs about what was ahead. Despite Jeffrey’s nightly harangues, Richard still hadn’t married Sharon, Greg hadn’t moved to the farm as Jeffrey had demanded nor had he married Debbie, and Dennis Patrick was still questioning Jeffrey’s scripture interpretations in classes. Privately, Alice suspected that one reason Jeffrey had started bringing his .45 pistol to class with him every night was because, without it, he was afraid that no one was going to take him seriously.

  During the summer of 1988, Alice began drinking heavily. She would stay up until two or three in the morning watching videotapes and then sleep until one or two in the afternoon. She’d drink a beer before dinner and take a few Excedrin P.M. to quiet her nerves.

  Some nights she wouldn’t come to class. Instead, she’d have Jeffrey buy her a six-pack or a bottle of wine and she would drink in her room and pop painkillers while watching television. Alice’s drinking got to be a joke in the class because of comments that Jeffrey had made.

  “Everyone knew when the beer started following Alice into the bedroom that Jeffrey had told her he wanted to have anal sex,” Debbie later remembered.

  Jeffrey had talked openly about it. He had decided that Alice’s vagina had stretched after childbirth, making it difficult for him to achieve orgasm. As a result, he had turned almost exclusively to anal intercourse. Alice hadn’t protested, at least not to anyone in the group. The beers and pills supposedly helped Alice deal with the pain of anal sex.

  While that might have been one reason for Alice’s drinking, pill popping, and depression, there was another. When Alice was, as she later put it, “gut level honest” with herself, she didn’t really believe that Jeffrey was a prophet. Worse, after Shar left, Alice began to suspect that Jeffrey knew that his wife suspected he was a fraud. “I was expected to believe in him, that he was a prophet. If I didn’t believe him, I think he felt no one would.”

  Alice’s doubts and Jeffrey’s insistence on anal sex were linked, she later claimed. “Jeffrey was always dreaming up ways for me to prove that I really loved him. I decided it was because of his childhood. The only way that he had received attention and love was by proving that he deserved it, so Jeffrey was always demanding that I do things to prove to him that I loved him. He would say, ‘I’m testing you, Alice. I want to see how much you love me.’ And I would say, ‘Why do I have to be tested?,’ and he would say, ‘The Lord constantly tests the faith of his servants.’ Whenever he began to suspect that I doubted him, he would become more dominant in the bedroom. He had to control me. It became an obsession with him.”

  “At first,” Alice continued, “he used a lubricant when we had anal intercourse, but later he decided my own blood was the best lubricant.”

  One night in July, while Alice was lying in bed sipping a beer, she listened to Jeffrey teaching the group outside her bedroom. The four Excedrin that she had taken started to make her feel lightheaded. She knew that Jeffrey was going to cut this class short because he had already told her that he wanted to have anal sex after class. She took two more Excedrin and another swig of beer. She began to feel sorry for herself. “I thought, ‘Alice, all you’ve ever wanted in life was a decent house and a nice family. Is that so much to ask for?”’

  As she lay in bed, she thought back to the summer of 1969 when the patriarch had prophesied about her future. She had been so certain, so filled with dreams. Jeffrey hadn’t lived up to any of them. The only time in their marriage when they weren’t poor was when the group members supported them. How long would that last? How long before Jeffrey blew it again?

  Alice wasn’t certain how late it was when Jeffrey slipped into their bedroom, but by the time he got under the covers and began to kiss her, she was wallowing in self-pity and was drunk. As Jeffrey started to roll her over and pull off her pajama bottoms, Alice let loose with a string of profanity. During the next few minutes, she blistered Jeffrey in a voice that was slurred and often incoherent. She would later not be able to recall precisely what she had said that night nor was she really certain that she had actually said all of the words that she had been thinking. But the next morning, there was one word that seemed etched in her mind: LOSER.

  A short time after that encounter. Jeffrey told Alice that he wanted her to come to class. Instead of opening his scriptures, Jeffrey read a passage from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It was a short story that described how the King of Wu decided to test Sun Tzu’s leadership skills one day. The king asked Sun Tzu if he could take any group of people and turn them into a well-disciplined fighting force. When Sun Tzu replied that he could, the king sent him 180 women from the royal harem. Sun Tzu divided the women into two groups on the military parade ground and commanded them to “Face right!” The women burst into laughter. Some faced right, some left, others didn’t move. Sun Tzu repeated his instructions, and this time when the women giggled and turned the wrong way, he ordered two of the king’s favorite concubines to step forward. While everyone watched, Sun Tzu beheaded the women. He then gave the order “Face right!” and every woman did exactly that. Sun Tzu told the king that his new troops were ready to do whatever they were ordered.

  Jeffrey didn’t say much after he read the story and none of his followers was certain why it was important. They were to learn soon enough.

  Chapter 34

  DENNIS Avery had always had a terrible sense of timing and he proved it by showing up at the farmhouse to complain shortly after Shar left the group. Dennis had discovered that the $575 monthly rent for his three-bedroom house in Kirtland hadn’t being paid for nearly a year. Jeffrey had promised to make the payments but he hadn’t and Avery’s landlord was threatening eviction. Jeffrey didn’t have time to waste on Dennis Avery. “Dennis represented everything that I hated in a person,” Jeffrey later recalled. “He was a physical and spiritual weakling who couldn’t keep his house in order.” Jeffrey’s anger flashed. There was sufficient income coming into the commune to pay the Averys’ back rent, Jeffrey said, but he was not going to do it. Why should he help a Gentile get rich? he asked.

  Jeffrey told Dennis that he was going to have to move. If he left during the night and didn’t leave a forwarding address, his landlord probably wouldn’t be able to find him, and even if he did, so what? Dennis and Cheryl were broke. Taking them to court would be a waste of time.

  Dennis had always been proud that he didn’t have any debts, his brother Tim later recalled. In this case, Dennis didn’t have much choice. Dennis went home and told Cheryl to begin packing. On July 15, 1988, the Averys moved into a three-bedroom house that rented for $450 per month in Madison, twenty-four miles east of the farmhouse. Dennis didn’t leave a forwarding address nor tip off his landlord that he was going.

&
nbsp; Investigators would later wonder why the Averys remained loyal to the Lundgrens. This is how Jeffrey explained his hold on Dennis and Cheryl: “All of their lives the Averys had been losers. They’d never fit in, never really been accepted by anyone. They were oddballs and they knew it and deep down they hated it because they believed that they were just as good as anyone else; in fact, Dennis thought that he was better. What I offered them was a chance to be exactly that. They believed that Jesus Christ wanted them to be His disciples. Can you imagine—them as His disciples? But they believed it was true because they wanted to believe it was true and as long as they believed that I could take them to meet God, then they were going to follow me.”

  For whatever reason, when Cheryl enrolled Trina, Becky, and Karen in the Madison school district on August 15, she identified Alice Lundgren as the person the school should notify if it couldn’t find either parent and there was an emergency. And when Dennis filled out job applications, the first name that he always listed as a reference was Jeffrey’s.

  Trina Avery hadn’t wanted to move. She was just getting settled in the Kirtland schools. Being in ninth grade was difficult enough without being the new kid, especially when you were a heavyset, awkward, self-conscious girl much more at ease with a book than with other teenagers. Most people thought Trina looked like her mother. She had shoulder-length dark curly hair and a round face. But she had inherited both of her parents’ shyness. Trina hadn’t wanted to leave Independence and shortly after they arrived in Kirtland, she bought a bulky hot-pink sweatshirt and had the words WHY ME? printed on the front of it in big black letters. “I put ‘why me?’ on everything because I hate Ohio and I put it on my sweatshirt to get other kids’ reactions,” she told her grandmother. “Most kids think it’s crazy.” The question “Why Me?” became Trina’s trademark at school, where she stayed close to her younger sister Becky. Trina wrote “Why Me?” on her notebooks and included it in letters sent to a classmate back in Independence. Cheryl figured Trina would get over it. She and Dennis looked on Trina as their “brainy” child. She got good grades and often acted more like an adult than a youngster. Still, at age fourteen in 1988, Trina slept with a night-light in her room and hadn’t yet gotten rid of her stuffed animals and dolls. The night-light was a gift from her mother and was a white unicorn with a bulb inside. In her sparse bedroom, Trina had tacked up a poster. It was not a photograph of a teenage heartthrob or rock-and-roll star, but a picture of three Care Bear cartoon figures hugging each other. She had gotten it during an RLDS summer camp. “Good friends are worth holding on to,” it said.

  The Averys’ middle daughter, Becky—only her father called her Rebecca—was twelve when the family moved to Madison and was so different from Trina that strangers never would have guessed they were related. She was such a picky eater that Cheryl worried that Becky might be anorexic. A school counselor dismissed her fears, suggesting instead that Becky’s poor eating habits were simply a way for her to show her independence. Becky was stubborn, always on the go, and a tomboy ready to take on any dare. Shortly after the family moved to Ohio, Becky decided to try her mother’s curling iron without telling anyone. Within ten minutes, she had gotten her long stringy hair so tangled up that it took Cheryl two hours to free it. Becky’s most prized possessions were her pet goldfish, which she named “Happiness,” a twenty-eight-inch-tall [she had measured him twice] stuffed dog named “Big Carl,” and a special white pillowcase that she had made in Independence while in Orioles, an RLDS girls’ group. It was divided into six squares and each contained the outline of a human hand that had been first drawn on and then stitched with thread. Besides the outline of Becky’s own hand, the prints on the pillowcase belonged to the four other girls in her Orioles group and her leader. Becky always showed her pillowcase to visitors and quickly confided that she had liked Carey, who was “really, really nice,” but not another girl whose hand was on the case because she had been “creepy.” Such comments would embarrass Cheryl, but Becky didn’t care. She said what she thought.

  Karen, who had just turned six when the family moved to Madison, was the baby. She was, in Becky’s words, “a giggle-box,” who was always smiling, always laughing. If Karen wasn’t playing with her favorite doll—“Linda”—she was sprawled on the floor with her pick-up sticks. Once the family got to Madison, Karen went to first grade at the Red Bird Elementary School. She had enjoyed herself until a boy made fun of how she talked. Words such as “okay” and “see” came out sounding like “oway” and “thee.” Trina told Karen to ignore the boy. Becky suggested that Karen kick him in the leg.

  Cheryl had taught all three girls to sew and Trina and Becky were both making quilts. They worked on them after school on special racks kept in the living room. The racks weren’t in the way. There wasn’t much other furniture in the house. The family room contained a well-worn sofa and a folding lawn chair. The walls were decorated with drawings by the children, posters from magazines, and cross-stitch pictures that Cheryl and the girls had sewn. Karen had just finished making a bunny rabbit on a cross-stitch pattern for her father.

  Jeffrey would later accuse the Avery girls of being ill mannered and disobedient, but no one else in his group would remember them that way. Even if they had been, they were not as troublesome as the Lundgrens’ own four children. Damon, who was about to turn eighteen in the fall of 1988, was a slender, rather docile boy whose goal in life seemed to be trying to please his father. Jeffrey had decided to make Damon his successor and was molding him into being a leader. In Jeffrey’s mind, that meant making Damon tougher. It was a difficult job, according to Damon’s grandmother, Donna Keehler, because Jeffrey had spent most of Damon’s life beating the spunk out of him. “You get whipped so many times for being disobedient, and you don’t be disobedient,” she explained. Still, Damon tried to live up to his father’s arrogant ways. When his father put him in charge of cleaning the weapons and leading the men in exercises, he strutted around the farm. “One time Damon came in the room where Richard and I were,” Sharon later testified. “Damon told Richard he had to stand at attention when he [Damon] entered. Another time, he told Richard to kiss his feet or something like that.” Debbie had known Damon all his life and she noticed a change. “Jeffrey made him a two-star general. He answered only to Jeffrey.”

  Ironically, Damon’s younger brother, Jason, couldn’t care less about doing what his father wanted. Yet when it came to a family pecking order, Jason was Jeffrey’s favorite son. Although Jason was only fourteen, he was built like his father and could overpower Damon and give most of the men in the group a good fight if he wished. Jeffrey said Jason was too young to study with the adults and that suited him fine. “I thought all that stuff he was teaching was boring,” he later said. No one at the farmhouse except for Jeffrey could tell Jason what to do, and even Jeffrey frequently had to back up his orders with physical threats to make Jason comply.

  Daughter Kristen, who was nine years old, was an active, beautiful girl, but even by Alice’s account she was “completely spoiled by her father.” Behind her back, group members called her “prissy” rather than “Krissy.” Whatever she wanted, Jeffrey made certain that she got. The Lundgrens’ youngest child, Caleb, age seven, was mostly ignored by his parents. He was a sweet child, but Jeffrey had always thought him dense and he treated him with disdain.

  During late July and early August, Jeffrey moved to reinstate his authority over the group. One night when Greg Winship wasn’t in class, Jeffrey told everyone that they were going to have a special class designed to pressure Greg into moving into the farmhouse. Greg was an avid volleyball player, and after the temple takeover was called off, he had started to drift away from the group. Jeffrey’s special class worked. On Labor Day, Greg moved in and was rewarded by Jeffrey with an expensive antique bedroom set. Other group members got rewards too. Jeffrey had just received a surge of cash. Debbie’s house in Independence had sold and she had also settled the workman’s compensation claim that sh
e had filed after she hurt her back working in an Independence hospital. Combined, those two checks totaled $32,492.32, all of which Debbie dutifully turned over to Jeffrey.

  Jeffrey bought clothes for Alice and together they went antiques shopping. He bought himself a .54-caliber black-powder rifle for his gun collection and he purchased a 1986 Nissan pickup truck. He took everyone to a nearby amusement park for a day, and he and the other adults went out to dinner several times. Jeffrey encouraged Richard and Sharon to go out on dates and sent Greg and Debbie dancing at the Brown Derby, a popular Kirtland restaurant-bar. Jeffrey concentrated on cementing his relationship with Ron Luff too. He bought toys for the Luff children and went out of his way to spend more time with Ron. Both of them enjoyed weight lifting, and when they worked out together, Jeffrey began sharing with Ron what seemed to be confidential information about the group and scriptures. “Basically what he told me was that I was to be the spokesman for the seer in the last days,” Ron later told investigators. “That became a second-in-command type situation for me.” As Jeffrey’s new lieutenant, Ron was expected to help keep the group in line. Whenever Jeffrey decided to “session” someone in class, Ron would jump in.

  There was only one family that didn’t benefit from Debbie’s cash. Jeffrey didn’t do anything special for Dennis and Tonya Patrick or their daughter, Molly. “They don’t deserve it,” he told Alice.

  In September, Jeffrey announced that he had used the pattern to discover a new revelation that had made the taking of the Kirtland temple no longer necessary. Jeffrey had discovered a way for his followers to meet God face-to-face. In fact, if the group followed Jeffrey’s instructions, every one of them would not only be able to see God, but also to touch God. According to the Book of Mormon, an ancient Hebrew identified as the “Brother of Jared” was so righteous that God appeared before him. Jeff was fascinated by the story and claimed that he had discovered a way for the group to compel God to appear to them in the same way.