by Pete Earley
It was nearly midnight by the time the others at the farm finished getting everything packed. A heavy fog had come over the farm. It was so thick that it was difficult to make out objects that were more than five feet away. The group decided that God had created the fog to make it difficult for the police or FBI to see them loading the truck. God was helping them escape. Debbie was excited when the caravan finally left the farmhouse.
“I was a bit nervous about who was on our tail at first,” she said later, “but once we got out of Ohio, I began to relax.”
Jeffrey had told Debbie that she and Greg were going to have a baby, even though Debbie had undergone a partial hysterectomy. He had told her that she would be healed and when she was packing for the trip, Tonya had given her some of Molly’s old baby clothes to take. She wanted to have Greg’s child. She loved him. She also believed in Jeffrey.
“He was going to take us to see God face-to-face. And I was really looking forward to that moment.”
PART THREE
Killer
And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God . . .
Deuteronomy 13:5
Chapter 43
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel ... (Numbers 13:1-2)
LIKE Moses, Jeffrey was leading his followers into the wilderness, so it seemed fitting that after two days of traveling southeast on various state highways, they arrived in the Canaan Valley of West Virginia. When Jeffrey pulled into Davis, a town of 950, and spied a motel called The Highlander, he declared that he had arrived at the spot where God wanted them. While the family relaxed at a motel, Jeffrey left early each morning to search for a suitable campsite.
His choice of the Canaan Valley almost did seem divinely inspired. Tucked in the Appalachian Mountains, Davis is located on a jagged sliver of West Virginia caught between the states of Maryland and Virginia like a finger slammed in a car door. Settlers were drawn to the valley in the 1880s because of its abundant timber, clear streams, and coal. Today it is the Canaan Valley Ski Resort and the Smoke Hole Caverns, both south of Davis, that attract crowds. Neither interested Jeffrey, but two miles east of town, he found exactly what he was looking for—a huge undeveloped and isolated tract known locally as Yellow Creek Hollow. Officially, the miles of pine forests were owned by the Monongahela Power Company, but the hollow was a virtual no-man’s land, open year-round without charge to the public for camping, fishing, and hunting. Best of all, Jeffrey learned, there was little supervision.
By April 23, Jeffrey had moved the group to a campsite in the hollow, but after some fishermen wandered through, he decided to go deeper into the forest. He settled near a stream and organized his camp “chiastically,” with a group of tents on one side of the water and another group on the other. The sites were supposed to mirror each other “just like verses in the scriptures.” Danny Kraft, Jr., designed a fifteen-foot bridge, which the men made out of logs, to connect the sites.
Jeffrey wanted his camp to be as comfortable as possible. A kerosene-powered generator supplied sufficient electricity to operate a deep freeze, a microwave oven taken from the Avery household, an electric fence used to pen the two horses, and a pair of televisions and videotape players. One television and VCR was kept on a picnic table for the group. The other was in Jeffrey’s tent for his private use. There were more than two dozen movies including The Highlander.
Jeffrey and Alice lived in the largest tent. It was divided into three sections. One was used as a living room, the other two as bedrooms. Jason, Kristen, and Caleb had mattresses in one; Jeffrey and Alice slept in the other. Damon lived in a separate tent with Danny. Each family had its own tent. There was also a tent for supplies and one filled with toys for the children. A tarp strung over picnic tables served as an outdoor dining area and there was another tent for use as a kitchen.
Because Debbie Olivarez had worked as a cook at summer church camps, she made all the meals. Kathy Johnson tended the horses. Tonya Patrick oversaw the laundry, which was washed in water from the stream and rinsed in big plastic trashcans. Susie Luff and Sharon Bluntschly took care of the supply tent, watched the children, and cleaned the Lundgrens’ tent. As was the case at the farm, Alice didn’t have specific chores.
Jeffrey assigned each man a job. Richard Brand emptied the toilets—trashcans lined with plastic bags—and built a shower using a lawn sprinkler as a showerhead. Greg Winship and Damon Lundgren helped care for the horses. Dennis Patrick was in charge of the fire pit where trash was burned. Keith Johnson, Ron Luff, and Danny Kraft collected firewood and did the countless other chores that arose during the day. Jeffrey’s job was hunting game in the mornings and teaching at night. Each of the men, except Jeffrey, also took turns standing guard. When they were on sentry duty, they were armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle. Most days, Jeffrey wore a .45- caliber pistol on his belt. By this time, he had promoted himself to the rank of five-star general in the Army of Israel. His army’s ammunition and most of the guns were stored in a locker at the foot of Jeffrey’s bed. The trunk had belonged to Cheryl Avery, who had saved her babysitting money as a teenager to buy it for her trip to college.
On May 3, Jeffrey arose early and announced that he was going to the top of a nearby mountain to meet God. It was Jeffrey’s birthday, and now that he had sacrificed the Averys, it was time for him to be “endowed with power.” He returned at midmorning, riding into camp on the ATV. Everyone swarmed around him.
“Jesus Christ appeared to me,” Jeffrey proclaimed. Christ had descended from heaven in a beam of light and had told him that He was pleased with the blood atonement of the Averys and the group’s trek into West Virginia. Because of Jeffrey’s faithfulness, Christ had bestowed a new title on him. Jeffrey told everyone to open their Bibles to verse 5 of chapter 54 of Isaiah:
For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; the God of the whole earth shall he be called.
“I have taken on Christ’s name,” Jeffrey announced. “I am not Jesus Christ, but because I have taken on the task that He has commanded me to do, I can be like Jesus Christ and He has given me the title of ‘God of the whole Earth.’”
Christ had made him immortal, Jeffrey said. He could no longer be “pierced” by bullets, knives, or any other objects. Christ had also made him divine. “I am the law,” said Jeffrey. “There is no other law.” No one in the camp was to question any command that he gave. “Would you question Jesus Christ?” Jeffrey asked them. “Then do not try to tell the God of the whole earth what to do.” Anything less than total subservience was a “sin” and a sign of “rebellion” that would block the group from being able to stand before God.
During the next few weeks, a routine developed at camp. The women worked in the mornings while the men either hunted or studied their scriptures. Afternoons were reserved for family time when parents were supposed to teach their children the pattern and how to use it. Jeffrey taught a scripture class each night. There were two new concepts that Jeffrey promoted after he declared himself the “God of the whole earth.” He called them “peradventuring” and “delusion.”
Peradventuring was a word that Jeffrey had derived from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, found in chapter 18 of Genesis. God had decided to destroy the town of Sodom because it was wicked, but Abraham bargained with Him and got God to promise to spare Sodom if “peradventure there may be fifty righteous within the city.” Abraham couldn’t find 50, so he asked God to make the number 45, then 40, 30, and 10. God finally ended up destroying the city, just as He had planned. Jeffrey said that Abraham’s bargaining with God was “peradventuring.” Abraham was trying to second-guess the Lord. Whenever anyone in Jeffrey’s group made a suggestion or even used the phrase “Well, I just thought . . . “Jeffrey and Alice would accuse them of “peradventuring.” The o
nly person in the group who was supposed to think was Jeffrey. Everyone else was to “submit” their will to his.
The second concept that Jeffrey taught was called “delusion.” According to the New Testament book of Second Thcssalonians, chapter 2, verses 10 to 13, people who rejected God’s truth were given “a strong delusion” by God so that “they should believe a lie.” Jeffrey interpreted that verse to mean that he could lie whenever he wished. “If someone is wicked, then he is your enemy, he is under Satan’s authority and you do not tell your enemy what you are doing,” Jeffrey explained. “There is nothing wrong with deceiving your enemy—military generals do it all the time.” Jeffrey said that if he told anyone in the group an obvious lie, he wasn’t really at fault—he was giving them a delusion because they didn’t want to hear the truth. They were to blame.
Greg Winship and others took notes during Jeffrey’s classes. The police later confiscated some of these records and discovered that Alice acted as Jeffrey’s cheerleader after most classes. She would jump up and lecture or chastise the class. Here is a sample of what the police found:
Alice on July 9 [Explaining how women are to be sexually subservient to their husbands]: “Ladies, give till they can’t take any more!”
Alice on July 22: “It’s my observation you get into trouble when you start using your own thoughts. Always ask what would Dad [Jeffrey] do? What has Dad said to do? Every situation you’re in is an open-book test and you forget to use the books.”
Alice on August 5: “If the rest of us think we will skirt by without judgment—we’re wrong. If Jeff says there is rebellion and the thought comes ‘I have no rebellion,’ that’s rebellion.”
From the moment the group arrived in West Virginia, Dennis Patrick was a problem. “I fell into a total depression after the Averys’ murders,” he said later. “I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was just numb.” Tonya became frustrated. “I needed Dennis and he wasn’t there for me,” she said. “Dennis was a complete zombie.”
Dennis’s depression irked Jeffrey. “I told Dennis to get his act together. Everyone understood that God had ordered me to destroy the wicked. Why then would Dennis mourn their destruction? Why would he be upset that the wicked had been destroyed unless he too was under Satan’s influence?”
Despite Jeffrey’s repeated warnings, Dennis couldn’t shake his depression. He was appalled by the murders. Jeffrey decided to have a special class specifically about the executions to “shake up” Dennis. Jeffrey wanted to remind him that he too would be sacrificed if he didn’t do what the “God of the whole Earth” demanded. “I related to the class that I saw Cheryl and Trina being killed,” Richard Brand said later. “I told Dennis Patrick that was no way for anyone to die. It was not even an option to consider—to be executed like that.”
The most exhausting account of what happened in the barn on April 17 was provided by Jeffrey, who described in incredible detail, without any hint of emotion, exactly how he had killed each member of the Avery family. After class, he told Dennis that he was going to meet a similar fate if he continued to show remorse over the “destruction of the wicked.”
Terrified, Dennis managed to put on a happier face, but he soon found himself in trouble. It began when he and Tonya drove into Davis to wash the group’s clothing at a Laundromat because it had been raining for a week, making it impossible to wash and dry the clothes outdoors. Although wives were supposed to be subservient to their husbands, Jeffrey had put Tonya in charge of the laundry. Dennis was merely sent along to help. Yet when they reached the Laundromat, Tonya found that she had only enough cash to wash and dry half the laundry. Jeffrey hadn’t given her enough money. She decided to wash and dry half the load so that the group would have some clean clothing to wear, but Dennis told her that it would be better to wash all of the clothing and then take it back to camp wet where it could be put out to dry. After a brief but hot argument, Tonya relented. When they returned to camp, Jeffrey asked Tonya why none of the laundry was dry and she explained what had happened.
Jeffrey accused Dennis of peradventuring. Jeffrey had put Tonya in charge. By upsurping her power, Dennis had tried to second-guess Jeffrey’s will.
Everyone in the group began chastising Dennis. “It may sound like a minor thing,” Kathy Johnson said later, “but if Dennis couldn’t obey a simple command, how could anyone count on him to obey a big one? The goal of the group was to become one heart and one mind with Jeffrey so we could see God. Dennis was keeping us from that.”
That night at class, Jeffrey turned to Debbie. “How long would it take for Dennis to die,” he asked, “if I strapped him to a tree and shot him in the balls?”
Dennis’s face lost its color. The group became silent. Without waiting for Debbie to reply, Jeffrey slowly removed his .45 pistol from his belt. Dennis thought he was going to be killed.
“Jeffrey said that I wasn’t being a man because I wasn’t taking responsibility for keeping the commandments of God,” Dennis Patrick recalled, “so if I were to have seed, that seed would be bad seed. He said he was going to destroy my seed by shooting off my balls, and then he was going to let me die a slow and agonizing death.”
Jeffrey pointed his pistol at Dennis’s crotch and for several tense seconds, everyone watched, fully expecting Jeffrey to pull the trigger. “I was going to shoot him,” Jeffrey said later. “I had thought that my people had learned their lesson but Dennis still didn’t get it. I was not joking around. God had ordered me to destroy the wicked and Dennis was clearly one of them.”
Dennis begged for another chance “to get it right.” He groveled.
“Okay,” said Jeffrey. He lowered his pistol.
Dennis would get a final chance, but as punishment, Tonya and Molly were going to be taken out of Dennis’s tent. He needed to be alone so that he could concentrate on his sin. Tonya and Molly were told to move in with Jeffrey and Alice. Dennis was forbidden to speak to his wife and daughter without permission from Jeffrey. The other men in the group were told to take away Dennis’s weapons and instructed to stand guard at night over Dennis’s tent to make certain that he didn’t try to escape. “Every second after that,” Dennis remembered, “I was being watched and my every move, my every comment was reported directly to Jeffrey.”
During the next few days, Jeffrey talked openly about killing Dennis. At one point, Jeffrey said he was going to order the men to dig a pit for Dennis “just like the one that was dug for the Averys.” Another time Jeffrey told Dennis that he would be killed while he was sleeping. “Jeffrey said he was going to have all the men surround my tent at night and simply open fire.”
Alice encouraged Dennis’s fears. “Jeff’s got the same look in his eyes as he did on the day that he killed the Averys,” Tonya later quoted Alice as saying.
“I lay awake for hours at night in the quiet and every time I heard a twig break or a leaf rustle,” said Dennis, “I’d wonder if they were coming to kill me.” He thought about getting a gun and shooting Jeffrey, but decided that he couldn’t. “I’m not capable of killing someone.” He thought about trying to escape, but rejected that thought too. “I didn’t want to leave Tonya and Molly behind. Besides, if I went to the police and told them what kind of weapons Jeffrey had, there was going to be an armed attack and I didn’t want Tonya and Molly killed.” He thought about suicide, but didn’t want to do that either. “Deep down, I still believed Jeffrey was a prophet and I really wanted to do everything right. I believed that Jeffrey could lead me to the Lord.”
Dennis decided to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t argue, didn’t make suggestions, he simply did what he was told.
Jeffrey had always taught that if a man was so wicked that he had to be destroyed, then the rest of his family also had to be murdered. While Tonya was worried about Dennis’s fate, she was also angry because she felt that he had put her and Molly into a precarious position.
“One night Tonya asked me if she and Molly were in danger,” Je
ffrey said, “and I told her that she was completely safe.” That was not all Jeffrey told Tonya. Three days after she moved into his tent in early May, Jeffrey said that he was in love with her.
“He was very tender at first,” Tonya said later, “very caring and kind.” Jeffrey told Tonya that he had always felt a special “tenderness” toward her even during their college days before she had married Dennis, when all of them used to hang out at the RLDS student center in Warrensburg. Because of his warm feelings toward her, Jeffrey had asked God what role Tonya was to play in his life. The answer, he said, had dumbfounded him. Tonya was to be his second wife. “You are flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,” she later quoted him as saying. Jeffrey had come up with a new scriptural interpretation. He had already told everyone that God had created a “true companion” for every man. This companion was made by God out of the man’s rib—just as Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Jeffrey was now telling Tonya that God actually created two “true companions” for every man. “The rib cage is chiastic. There is a rib on each side, so God really takes both of them, not just one.” Jeffrey told Tonya that she was his Bathsheba, that she was his “missing” second rib.
Tonya believed Jeffrey. She was also frightened of him. Within a week, the two of them were having sex. Tonya was worried that Alice would find out. Jeffrey assured her that Alice wouldn’t know and if she did, he’d come up with an explanation to satisfy her.
Despite Jeffrey’s assurances about Alice, she began suspecting within a month. “Tonya was a very prim and proper person when she first moved into our tent,” Alice recalled. “She always wore a bathrobe, and then all of the sudden, she wasn’t wearing one and wasn’t being careful at all around Jeff.”
In early June, Alice had one of her recurring migraine headaches. She didn’t attend that night’s scripture class but at one point, she walked outside the tent to use the bathroom. On her trip back, Alice spotted Jeffrey and Tonya walking hand in hand across the camp. “They stopped and kissed.”