by Pete Earley
Everyone was quiet for several seconds and then Jeffrey realized that he hadn’t gotten the key to the Red Roof motel room from Dennis before he was shot. Jeffrey planned to clean out the motel room to make it look as if the Averys had left town.
“Damon, get the key out of his pocket,” Jeffrey ordered. Damon didn’t move. He was crying.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t believe he is dead. I can’t believe he is dead.”
Jeffrey walked over to his son and put his arms around him. He still had the .45 in his hand.
“It’s okay,” he said, “you’re growing up at a young age.”
Jeffrey glanced around. It was dark except for the lone light bulb that Damon had hung earlier. He still needed the motel key.
“If nobody else will do it,” said Ron, “I will.”
He jumped down into the pit and grabbed Dennis by his belt. When he lifted up the body, there was a loud “sigh” as air escaped from the corpse. Everyone flinched.
“That was his last breath of life,” Jeffrey said.
Ron fumbled through Dennis’s pockets with his free hand, but he couldn’t find the key, only a driver’s license and library card. He dropped Dennis back in the mud.
“We’ve got to have that key,” Jeffrey said.
No one moved. Jeffrey walked out of the room, leaving the others alone with the body. As soon as Jeffrey was gone, they hurried out.
Jeffrey went inside the farmhouse and asked Cheryl for the key. She gave it to him. Jeffrey silently chided himself. He should have known that Dennis would have given his wife the hotel key. That was the sort of guy he was. Jeffrey returned to the barn and removed the .45 from its hiding place under his shirt. Damon was crying so Jeffrey told him to climb into the loft and stand by the window. He could be a lookout.
“Okay, Ron, bring out the next one,” Jeffrey said. He had not said “Bring out Cheryl.” He had not wanted to say her name.
Ron walked to the farmhouse. Cheryl was inside with Debbie, Susie, and Sharon.
“Ron told Cheryl that Dennis needed her help in the barn,” Debbie later testified, “so she left with him.”
Greg, Richard, and Danny surrounded Cheryl as soon as she stepped into the barn.
“Be calm,” Ron said, “don’t struggle—just give it up.”
Confused and frightened, Cheryl stood perfectly still as the men wrapped tape around her hands, ankles, mouth, and eyes. Jeffrey didn’t want Cheryl’s eyes uncovered.
In the farmhouse, Debbie paced across the kitchen floor. She heard Greg start the chain saw.
“You can’t have that,” someone said. Debbie spun around. Trina and Becky were arguing in front of the refrigerator. They were looking for dessert. Debbie told them to take whatever they wanted and then snapped: “Close the door!” As soon as she said it, she felt bad. She hadn’t meant to be sharp. Susie walked over to her.
“Do you think it’s happening?” Susie whispered.
“I hear the chain saw,” said Debbie. “I think so.”
Dennis had been almost too heavy for Danny to carry, so once Cheryl was taped and lying on the barn floor, Richard asked Ron if he would help carry her into the pit. They lifted up Cheryl and lugged her across the barn into the back room where Jeffrey was waiting. Ron and Richard gently eased Cheryl into the pit. The mud quickly soaked through her baggy sweatpants. Ron stayed inside the room this time to make certain that no one opened or closed the door. Richard stepped out into the main portion of the barn.
Jeffrey got up and moved to the pit. He raised his gun and started pulling the trigger. Cheryl’s body smacked into the side of the pit when hit by the slugs. The autopsy would later show that Cheryl was struck twice in the right breast and once in the abdomen. All three bullets were later recovered, and unlike the soft-pointed hollow-points that were fired into Dennis, these were full-metal-jacketed rounds designed to penetrate, not mushroom. Jeffrey had switched shells intentionally. He was experimenting.
“According to the scriptures, I was going to kill again. I wanted to learn as much as I could from this experience.”
Jeffrey would later recall that at one point he had talked to Ron about going into the pit after the murders to stab the corpses: “Just to see what it would feel like.” But Jeffrey had decided against it.
No one came to look at Cheryl’s body. After she was shot, Jeffrey and Ron left the room and went outside into the night air. The autopsy would later show that despite the wounds, Cheryl hadn’t died instantly. A coroner would estimate that she had been alive in the pit for up to five minutes after being shot.
Jeffrey had waited this time for Greg to run the chain saw, and when Jeffrey and Ron stepped out of the barn, he was squeezing the trigger hard so the engine would rev and then slowly releasing it. He was trying to mimic the sound of a saw cutting wood. Jeffrey and Ron walked around the barn, checking the highway and the lights at neighbors’ houses to see if anyone had become suspicious. Lee and Lois Myers, who lived east of the barn, were coming in from their patio when Lois heard the chain saw and what sounded like a gunshot. Dorothy Green, who lived across the street from the barn, heard the chain saw and at least one gunshot. But neither woman thought it was odd. It wasn’t uncommon for people to hunt in the area even at night.
“Bring out the next one,” said Jeffrey.
Trina Avery was in the living room reading a magazine when Ron told her that her mother needed her in the barn. The fifteen- year-old sighed and obediently followed him outside.
“Here she comes!” yelled Damon.
The men swarmed around her as soon as Trina stepped inside. Ron told Trina that they were going to play a game. Most of the children had played hide-and-seek in the barn at one time or another. The previous Halloween, the kids had used the barn for skits and a spook house. Trina didn’t ask any questions. Ron told her to relax. It was going to be fun. The men taped her feet and hands, and wrapped the tape around her face.
“It’s just like the three monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil,” one of them said.
No one could tell if Trina was smiling. Her head was wrapped like a mummy. Ron and Richard lifted her up and started to carry her through the barn, but as they were walking, Richard accidentally tripped on the extension cord that led to the light over the pit. The bulb fell and broke, leaving Jeffrey in the dark.
“Get a new bulb!” Jeffrey yelled. Ron and Richard put Trina down on a mound of dirt and trash.
Ron stayed with her and told her not to worry, while Richard hurried to another part of the barn to get a bulb. Within a few minutes, the light was restrung and the two men picked up Trina and carried her into the room. They lowered her into the pit next to her parents. Jeffrey stepped up and took aim. Since he had shot her parents in the upper body, Jeffrey decided to shoot Trina in the skull to see, as he later put it, which caused death more quickly—a “head shot or by shooting them in the heart.” Just as he squeezed the trigger, however, Trina turned.
“Ouch!” the teenager shrieked, even though her mouth was taped.
Thinking he’d missed her head or just grazed it, Jeffrey quickly lowered the barrel and fired two shots into Trina’s back. She slumped forward. He looked down at her. She wasn’t moving so he decided that he didn’t need to shoot her again.
Just as they had done before, Jeffrey and Ron walked around the barn to see if any of the neighbors were watching. It didn’t look like it.
There were only two children left now. Becky and Karen. Ron found them playing video games in the house.
“Who wants to see the horses in the barn?” he asked cheerfully.
Both girls dropped the video-game controls, jumped up, and rushed toward the back door.
“I can only take you one at a time,” he announced.
Karen, the smallest, returned to the video game. She was used to being the last in line. Ron told her that he’d be right back.
“Oway,” she replied.
After Becky left, Karen not
iced that her mom and dad and sister Trina were missing.
“Where’s my mama?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” Susie answered automatically, “she’ll be right back.” As Susie watched Karen return to her video game, she suddenly realized what she had said. She turned away from the child. She couldn’t stand to look at her.
By this time, each man had found his own specialty. Damon was the lookout, Ron escorted the victims, Richard and Danny handled the taping, Greg ran the chain saw, Jeffrey did the killing.
Unlike her obedient sister, when Becky got to the barn and saw the duct tape, she asked: “What’s going on?”
“We told her that we were just playing a game and that she was going for a ride,” Richard recalled later.
Within seconds, Ron and Richard had carried her into the room and put her in the pit. Jeffrey shot her, but he didn’t think that his first shot killed the feisty thirteen-year-old. She was still breathing. The impact of the bullet had knocked her over and she had hit her mother’s corpse.
“I fired again,” Jeffrey later said, “and when this shot hit her, her hands, which had been in her lap, went forward as if she was reaching to touch her mother’s body—as if she instinctively knew that her mother was there beside her.”
Ron went to fetch Karen while Jeffrey reloaded. As soon as Ron stepped inside the farmhouse, Karen was on her feet, eager to see the horses. Ron scooted down and the six-year-old rushed over to him and climbed onto his back. He had given piggyback rides before. His son, Matthew, was the same age as Karen; his daughter, Amy, was four. Karen put her arms around his neck and laughed as Ron bounced her on his back and walked outside.
Like her sisters, Karen didn’t resist when the men wrapped her with duct tape, although she was clearly frightened when they put it around her eyes and mouth. She only weighed thirty-six pounds, so Ron picked her up by himself and carried her into the room and pit.
Jeffrey had already fired hollow-points, full-metal-jackets, and silver-tipped 184-grain bullets. He had shot his victims in the back, breasts, skull, and legs. Because Karen was so tiny, he didn’t want to risk missing her. He also wanted to try a different angle of penetration. This time, Jeffrey chambered a .225-grain hollow-point slug that he had loaded himself. He stood directly over Karen, who was sitting in the mud. Since her eyes were taped, she had no idea that her parents and sisters were sprawled dead around her.
“I fired straight down into her skull,” Jeffrey recalled. “I was less than two feet away and I pulled the trigger, bang, bang.”
He was trying to put both shots into the same hole. Karen’s body jumped when hit and then slumped over.
It was now almost 11:00 P.M.. Jeffrey told Richard and Ron to dump bags of lime on the bodies. He thought that the lime would help them decompose. Richard carried a bag to the pit and slit it open. He tried to pour it on the bodies without looking at them.
“It didn’t seem real,” Ron said later. He would later not be able to recall Becky and Karen’s names when he eventually described their murders to police. “I’m kind of foggy on this business,” he’d say.
Once the lime was spread, they began to cover the bodies with rocks. They would then refill the hole and fill the room with trash.
Jeffrey took his pistol and left the other men to do the work. “Before I went into the farmhouse,” Jeffrey later recalled, “I walked into the apple orchard and looked up at the heavens and said a prayer. ‘God,’ I said, ‘I have been thy sword of judgment this day. May my offering be acceptable. May all I’ve done be acceptable to you this day.’ Then I went inside and cleaned up.”
Chapter 41
ALICE had driven directly to the Patricks’ apartment when she and three of her children left the farmhouse after dinner. She dropped Kristen and Caleb there to play with Molly Patrick and drove to Makro, a large discount department store in a nearby town, where she bought two picnic tables. Jason tagged along to help load them into the truck. A clerk had to get the tables out of a storeroom, and by the time Alice had paid and bought two one-pound bags of chocolate candy for her kids and a bag of cashews for herself, it was 10:30 P.M.
Alice returned to Kirtland and hurried inside the Patricks’ apartment without knocking. She went directly to the telephone and called the farmhouse. Debbie answered.
“Can I come home now?” Alice asked.
It had been about five minutes since Karen Avery had been taken into the barn.
“You’d better wait for about fifteen minutes,” said Debbie.
After Alice hung up the receiver, she went into the living room and sat on the sofa. Keith and Dennis sat on each side of her. They could tell she was upset. Dennis took her hand. Keith would later testify that Alice had a strange look on her face.
“The fog is bloodred over the barn tonight,” Keith quoted Alice as saying.
Shortly after eleven o’clock, Alice returned to the farm with her children. She went into the bedroom to talk to Jeffrey. Kristen, Caleb, and Jason were supposed to go upstairs to bed, but Jason came down a few minutes later.
“I asked Sharon where the men were,” Jason recalled. He was fond of Richard and wanted to see what he was doing. Sharon told Jason that all of the men were in the barn and Jason started toward the back door. Sharon rushed into the bedroom.
“Jason—Jason is heading out to the barn,” Sharon stammered.
“Stupid!” Alice screamed, “How could you let him do such a thing?”
She raced out and yelled at Jason to get back into the house. Once Alice made certain that he and the other two children were in bed, she rejoined Jeffrey.
Jeffrey told Alice and Damon that he wanted them to come with him to the Red Roof Inn. He took along two green trash bags. When they got there, all three of them hurried upstairs to the Averys’ room. Once inside, Jeffrey handed Alice and Damon trash bags and told them to start collecting the Averys’ possessions. Purses, toothbrushes, the girls’ dolls, Becky’s pillowcase from Orioles with the outline of hands on it—everything was thrown into the bags as the three carefully swept through the room. Suddenly, Alice gasped. On the counter in front of her was the picture that Karen had drawn of the rainbow.
It said: “To Alice—I Love You—Karen.”
Alice picked it up and slipped it in the trash bag.
Before they left the room, Jeffrey had Damon mess up the double beds and the rollaway to make it look as if they had been slept in. The room had been paid for in advance with cash so the Averys weren’t expected to check out. Jeffrey tossed the motel key on the television and pulled the door shut so that it locked automatically. They hurried down to the truck and drove home.
By the time they reached the farmhouse, the men had finished filling in the pit in the barn. Keith and Kathy Johnson and Dennis and Tonya Patrick had arrived at the farm for scripture class. Jeffrey had telephoned them before leaving for the motel and told them to come out. One by one, the adults filed into the living room and waited as Jeffrey took the trash bags from the truck into his bedroom.
“It was stone cold silent,” Alice recalled.
When Jeffrey returned, he opened the Book of Mormon and began to read:
“Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes.”
It was the verse from First Nephi that described how God had ordered Nephi to behead Laban.
Jeffrey shut his scriptures and looked up at the group. Everyone in the room, except for him, appeared to be in tears.
“Ron,” Jeffrey said, “did my servant Richard serve me well tonight?”
Ron replied; “Yes, your servant Richard served you well.”
Jeffrey went through the entire list of names and Ron’s answer was the same until he reached Damon. When Jeffrey asked about his son, Ron replied; “Your servant Damon served you the best that he could.”
Jeffrey told everyone that he was proud of how Damon had performed.
“Damon is a man now,” he said. “He served me well.”
&nbs
p; Jeffrey turned and stared at Dennis and then at Richard. “We were told that we were lucky to be alive,” Richard later said, “that Sharon and Tonya, because of their obedience to Alice, had pulled our cookies out of the sand.”
Jeffrey berated both men for several minutes for being rebellious and he warned them that they could still end up like the Averys. Dennis was shaking. Richard lowered his head and bent down in his chair, his hands dangling lifeless between his legs.
There was no doubt whatsoever that Dennis Avery was under Satan’s power, Jeffrey announced. “Even his last words were rebellious.” Jeffrey explained that just before his mouth was taped shut, Dennis Avery had said, “This isn’t necessary.”
“He was still trying to tell me what to do,” said Jeffrey. “He was trying to be the seer, the prophet.”
Dennis Patrick felt physically ill. He looked around the room. “Knowing how close we had come to being in the pit with the Averys, I couldn’t believe what he was saying. This was not the Jeffrey that I had known in Independence. This was someone else.”
Tonya couldn’t stop sobbing.
“I kept thinking about Karen,” she said. “The last time I’d seen her, Jeffrey had been holding her on his lap. He had been playing with her and now he had just killed her.”
Tonya would later quote Jeffrey as asking the group: “Is this real enough for you?”
Jeffrey wanted to know how everyone felt. He asked Richard first. “Nobody should have to die like that,” Richard said. “That’s just no way to go.”
When it was Keith’s tum to respond, he simply said, “Shit, shit, shit.”
“There is no going back now,” Kathy Johnson said.
This is what Alice remembered telling everyone. “Our lives are over. Life as we know it is gone. We are wanderers and strangers in a strange land.”
Debbie Olivarez would later quote Alice’s remarks differently. “Alice told us, ‘You need to be thankful for this man.’ She was talking about Jeff. She said, ‘He is going to take you to see God. He did this for you. He killed these people so you could see God.’ She was playing the role of cheerleader just as she always did for him.”