by Pete Earley
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he replied.
“What’s happening?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he repeated.
Donna tried several more questions and each was greeted by the same response. Finally she gave up. Jeffrey told her that Alice and the children were on their way to Macks Creek. They were bringing a friend and her two children with them. No problem, Donna said. She’d make room. Alice drove straight through. Donna was shocked when she saw her. “The Alice who came home to see me wasn’t my Alice,” Donna later said. “She was like a different person.”
Alice had gotten fat—nearly one hundred pounds heavier than when her mother had last seen her one year earlier. Her face was marred by three open sores that she constantly picked. And she was foul-mouthed. Alice had also become a faithful beer drinker.
Donna had heard about the temple-takeover plot from Chief Yarborough whom she had telephoned earlier that summer. She’d also talked to Dennis Patrick’s parents, who, in turn, had spoken with Dale Luffman in Kirtland. Donna began grilling her daughter.
“What in the world is going on?” she demanded. Alice lied to her about everything.
The next morning after Donna went to work, the telephone rang and Alice answered. It was Dennis Patrick’s mother. She mistakenly assumed that she had reached Donna and she began talking. Alice played along. The sheriff in West Virginia had flown over Jeffrey’s camp and was going to go in and question the group, Mrs. Patrick explained. She promised to call again when she had more details. After Alice replaced the telephone receiver, she began searching her mother’s cupboards. Neither Ralph nor Donna was a drinker, but Alice’s sister, Terri, had left several bottles of liquor behind when she and her husband moved to Saudi Arabia. Alice found some wine and rum. By midnight, she had drunk two bottles of wine and started on the rum.
Within an hour after Alice left West Virginia, Jeffrey began meeting individually with all of the men except for Keith. He explained that Kathy was his Bathsheba. Greg, Richard, Danny, Damon, and Dennis didn’t seem surprised or that concerned. But Ron was troubled. He didn’t believe in polygamy. Jeffrey had expected Ron to be distressed. That was why he had sent Susie along with Alice back to Macks Creek. He wanted Ron to know that Susie was safe. Jeffrey wasn’t going to claim her as a wife.
Jeffrey had found more than a dozen scriptures that, when diagramed by the pattern, seemed to say a man could have two wives. He gave them to Ron to study, figuring that they would keep him busy for several days.
By 8:00 P.M., Jeffrey had finished his rounds and was ready for scripture class. Jeffrey had told the men that he wanted them to sit near Keith during class, in case he decided to challenge Jeffrey’s decision to take Kathy as a wife. Meanwhile, Jeffrey tucked the .45 pistol that he had used to kill the Averys in his belt where everyone could see it. Jeffrey got right to the point.
“Kathy is now my wife,” he proclaimed.
Keith thought Jeffrey was joking. He looked around the group. No one was smiling. Keith realized he was surrounded. He saw Jeffrey’s .45. He glanced at Kathy. She was sitting next to Jeffrey where Alice usually sat. Jeffrey was serious.
“Do you have a problem with this?” Jeffrey asked Keith.
Keith tried to seem calm. He wanted to ask Jeffrey a question, he said. Keith reminded Jeffrey of the promise that he had made before the intercession dances. Jeffrey had said that he wouldn’t take Kathy as his wife. Everyone in camp had heard him.
“How can any of us trust you if you lie?” Keith boldly asked.
“I didn’t lie,” Jeffrey snapped. “Kathy was never your wife.” Jeffrey said he had searched the scriptures and had discovered that Kathy was flesh of his flesh—not Keith’s. “You were never married in God’s eyes,” he said. “If Kathy continues living with you, you will both be guilty of adultery.”
Keith appeared unconvinced. He and Kathy had been married for twelve years. They had four sons. He wanted to speak to her in private.
“How do I know you won’t hurt her?” Jeffrey asked. Keith agreed to speak to Kathy out in the open where Jeffrey could see them. Jeffrey said that would be okay. The estranged couple walked about thirty feet away from the group.
“Keith was stunned,” Kathy recalled. “He had no idea about what had been going on right under his nose or how I felt about Jeffrey. I told him, ‘This is what is right, Keith....’”
Keith said that she was his wife. He didn’t want her to go with Jeffrey.
“I want to be with Jeff,” Kathy said. “I am flesh of his flesh.” She turned and returned to Jeffrey’s side.
Now that everyone knew that Kathy belonged to Jeffrey, he had another announcement. He was going to split up the camp in case the helicopter returned. He and Kathy would move deeper into the woods. Ron, Damon, Greg, and Debbie would go with them. Dennis, Tonya, Keith, Danny, Richard, and Sharon would stay behind in the original camp. The reason Jeffrey wanted Ron, Damon, and Greg with him was because they were his “three witnesses.” Joseph Smith, Jr., had produced “three witnesses” when people questioned him about the mysterious golden plates. Jeffrey had told the group that God would give him golden plates similar to the ones that He had given Smith. When that happened, Jeffrey wanted his three witnesses standing by to verify the event.
After class, everyone began moving tents. By midnight, the move was complete and Jeffrey and Kathy had the large Lundgren tent all to themselves. They spent the next three days on a “honeymoon.”
Sheriff Thompson and Game Warden Spencer landed a few hundred feet from Jeffrey’s original camp on the day after it had been split. As soon as they got out of their helicopter, Thompson noticed that several tents were missing. Dennis Patrick and Danny Kraft greeted the lawmen.
“The women just stood there and stared at us,” said Thompson. The folksy sheriff asked Dennis why the group was camping in such an isolated area. “Our religious beliefs are different from most people’s,” Dennis replied. “We like the privacy.” Thompson asked if the group planned to spend the winter in the hollow. Dennis didn’t know, but he doubted it. He thought they might be moving to Missouri. At about that time, Sharon appeared with a tray of chocolate-chip cookies.
“Have one,” she said. Thompson glanced at Spencer. Both were afraid that the cookies were poisoned.
“I don’t think I need a cookie right now,” Thompson said. “You want one?” he asked, looking at Spencer. The game warden shook his head.
Dennis Patrick picked one up and ate it. Thompson reminded Dennis that all of the children in camp had to be enrolled in school. Dennis nodded, but again explained that the group was probably going to move. A few minutes later, Thompson and Spencer got back in their helicopter and left. When Thompson returned to his office, he telephoned Yarborough. The first question that Yarborough asked was “Did you see Jeffrey?” They talked for several minutes. Neither of them brought up the Averys. Yarborough assumed that Dennis and Cheryl had gone with everyone else to West Virginia. Thompson figured that Yarborough already knew who was part of Jeffrey’s group.
Keith Johnson decided to turn the tables on the prophet. Jeffrey had said that Kathy was his Bathsheba, so Keith went through the story of David and Bathsheba line by line. He then used the pattern to diagram several verses, and when he did, Keith made a shocking discovery. Two of David’s sons had died, Keith told Dennis Patrick, so it seemed logical that if Jeffrey claimed to be David and Kathy was Bathsheba, then two of Jeffrey’s sons would have to meet the same fate as David’s sons. Dennis immediately raced over to Jeffrey and told him what Keith was preaching.
Jeffrey called all of the men together and had them bring Keith out into the woods. They formed a circle around him. Keith was unarmed. Jeffrey had taken away his guns. But Jeffrey had his .45 automatic.
“If you are threatening me, Keith,” Jeffrey said, “then say so and let’s deal with it right now.”
Keith said that he wasn’t threatening anyone. He had simply been studying the sc
riptures.
“It’s not me,” he explained, “it’s the pattern.”
Jeffrey looked at the scripture. “You’ve done this wrong,” he declared. “It says that you should die and two of your sons will die too.”
“There can be only one prophet,” said Jeffrey, paraphrasing a line from the movie The Highlander. “I am that seer and the price for looking in the record for yourself is death.”
Keith apologized and begged Jeffrey not to kill him. He talked about his four sons. Who would raise them if he was dead?
“I was prepared to execute Keith,” Jeffrey later said. “The only reason why I didn’t shoot him was because l had promised Kathy that I wouldn’t harm him.”
Just the same, Jeffrey ordered Keith to move his tent up to the new camp. Ron moved in with Keith to watch him.
After Sheriff Thompson visited the camp, Jeffrey decided it was time for the group to leave West Virginia. But he was broke. Reluctantly, Jeffrey drove to a flea market in Elkins, West Virginia, and began selling some of the group’s rifles and pistols. He raised enough to buy a week’s worth of groceries and enough gasoline for a round-trip to Missouri. Once there, Kathy would invite several fundamentalists to a special class on the pattern that Jeffrey would teach. Afterward, he would solicit money which he would use to move the rest of the group back to Missouri. Jeffrey, Kathy, and Damon left for Missouri the next day. Jeffrey left Ron in charge of the camp.
En route, Jeffrey stopped at a pay phone and told Alice that he was coming. When she asked about Kathy, Jeffrey used “delusion.” He told Alice that Kathy was living with Keith back at the camp. He also told Alice that he had something exciting to show her. God had given him another revelation.
Alice was excited after Jeffrey called. She raced around the house like a schoolgirl getting ready for her senior prom. Alice fixed her hair, put on a dress, and eagerly waited. As soon as Jeffrey arrived, she darted out the door and threw her arms around him. Less than an hour before, Jeffrey had dropped Kathy at her mother’s house outside Warrensburg. She was supposed to telephone her fundamentalist friends and relatives and arrange a place for Jeffrey to hold a class.
As soon as Jeffrey was alone with Alice, he told her about God’s newest revelation. “Jeff said that he had gone up on the mountain in West Virginia and God had appeared and told him that He wanted Jeffrey to take a second wife. God had made a book appear and it had come down out of heaven and God had showed him the name of his second wife in this book.”
Alice was furious.
“She hit me and threatened me. ‘I’ll turn you in right now. I’m going to call the sheriff on you. I’m going to tell about the Averys,’ she said. Then she asked me if I knew who ‘it’ was, meaning my second wife, and I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘Do you love her?,’ and I said ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘I’ll kill it! I swear I’ll kill it. Who is she?’ Alice was serious about her threat so I refused to tell her.”
Alice already knew. “Who else could it have been but Kathy?” she later asked rhetorically. Then she added, sarcastically, “After all, it was her vagina that he had seen in his dream.”
Jeffrey stayed in Macks Creek for two days, and then he told Alice that he had to hurry back to West Virginia. He left Damon behind with orders to watch Alice and make certain that she didn’t tip off the police about the Averys. As soon as he left Alice, Jeffrey met Kathy and they went to Kingsville, a nearby town, where a friend of Kathy’s had offered to let Jeffrey teach his class. Kathy had managed to get about a dozen friends to attend. One would later describe Jeffrey as a “wild man.” His shoulder-length brown hair was dirty and matted. His face was badly sunburned, his shirt was dirty and half buttoned. For nearly an hour, Jeffrey rambled on about the pattern. He announced that he had personally seen Jesus Christ and had spoken to God. Michel Vick, a longtime friend of the Johnsons, later told a reporter for the News Herald, a Cleveland suburban newspaper, that she didn’t believe anything Jeffrey said. If Jeffrey had been permitted to meet Christ and talk to God, Vick reasoned, then he would have been happy and exuberant. “One of the fruits of it would be joy,” Vick explained. Instead, Jeffrey and Kathy looked like two fugitives on the run.
Jeffrey’s spiel for money was a bust. No one was willing to help move Jeffrey’s group from West Virginia back to Missouri. Jeffrey and Kathy returned to West Virginia with less money than they had left with.
Donna Keebler had grilled her son-in-law during his short visit, but he had not told her anything. As soon as he left, Donna began pressuring Alice to tell her the truth.
“Your father and I will protect you,” she told Alice.
Alice would later testify that the reason she never told the police about the murders was because Jeffrey made certain that at least one of their children was with him at all times. “I never was allowed to have all of them with me at one time,” Alice said. “I was afraid that he would hurt them if I called the police.”
But that was simply not true. “There was a time when Alice had all of her children here,” Donna said, “and Alice could have told us what was happening. I did my best to get her to tell us the truth. I pleaded with her. I told her that I would stand by her no matter what she and Jeffrey had gotten involved in. I promised her help, but Alice wouldn’t tell me the truth.”
Donna would later suggest that the reason Alice was reluctant to talk about the murders was not because she was scared of Jeffrey, but for another reason.
“Alice still loved Jeffrey. She was devoted to him.”
Having failed to learn anything from Jeffrey and Alice, Donna began to pepper Susie Luff with questions. One morning when Alice was still in bed, Donna cornered Susie. The older woman stepped in front of the door to the utility room where Susie was doing laundry. “I blocked her way so she couldn’t get past me.”
“Look, Susie,” Donna later recalled saying. “I want to know what is going on.”
Susie began to cry. She looked as if she were going to tell Donna the truth, but then she caught herself.
“We are a deeply religious group,” Donna later quoted Susie as saying. “Jeff is our teacher. We believe what he teaches us and we have done nothing wrong.”
“Susie, if you’re such a religious group,” Donna asked, “then why do you use the filthy language that I’ve heard around here?
Why does my Alice drink? Why is Jeffrey smoking? This is not religion.’’
“Jeffrey is our teacher,” Susie repeated, as if on automatic pilot. “We believe he is a prophet and we believe strongly in what he is teaching.’”
Donna looked directly at Susie. At least she had gotten her houseguest to admit that she thought Jeffrey was a prophet. “Susie,” Donna said, “I’m Jeffs mother-in-law. I’ve known him longer than you. Now, I can’t tell you what to believe, but if you think that Jeffrey Lundgren is a prophet, then you are a complete fool.”
By October, life in West Virginia was miserable. The air became bitter cold. Jeffrey and Kathy had a portable heater in their tent, but the others went without. There was no money for food. Some days, Debbie would serve rice and cream gravy three times a day. “I wanted people to at least get some protein.”
There were other problems as well. Richard had stopped talking to Sharon. Marrying her had been a big mistake, he had decided. Greg and Debbie were having marital problems too. Jeffrey had promised Danny that Shar Olson would eventually rejoin the group, but she hadn’t and he was lonely. Ron missed Susie, who was still in Macks Creek. Keith was brooding over his loss of Kathy. Dennis and Tonya were still estranged.
In order to raise cash, Jeffrey ordered his followers to begin selling everything that they didn’t need. He sent Dennis, Danny, Greg, and Richard to a nearby town in Maryland to look for work. As soon as they raised enough cash to rent a truck, they would move, he told them. But when the men were paid for a variety of minimum-wage jobs, Jeffrey collected their wages and drove into town with Kathy. He treated her to dinner. When they returned, Jeffrey announc
ed that he was going back to Missouri to find a house where they could all live together. He left Kathy in charge and took Ron with him.
Months later, group members would recall with irony that life at the camp had started to deteriorate shortly after Alice left the group. Jeffrey had preached that women were “weaker vessels” than men and not as intelligent or strong, yet without Alice, Jeffrey didn’t seem to know what to do.
Once again, Jeffrey spent only a few days at Macks Creek. He had brought Ron along, in part because he hoped that he could convince Alice that polygamy was not wrong. By this time, Ron had studied the scriptures that Jeffrey had showed him and become convinced that it was okay for Jeffrey to have two wives.
“Ron was always someone I could talk to,” Alice said later, “and I told Ron that this was just not right. But he looked at me and said, ‘Alice, we have to obey the will of the Lord.”’
Later, when Alice and Jeffrey were alone, she confronted him.
“Who is this person? Who is supposed to be your second wife? Or is it your third wife?” she asked. “How many more are you going to have?”
When Jeffrey refused to tell her, Alice slapped him. This time there was no one else watching, no one for Jeffrey to impress by absorbing Alice’s blows. He smacked her and punched her in the stomach. She fell down and he reached over and slapped her face hard, rupturing her eardrum.
“We had a go at it,” Jeffrey admitted later. “I told her that all I wanted to do was help her accept the truth, but she got angry and slapped me and that started it.”
Jeffrey left for West Virginia the next morning. The day after he arrived at the camp, he went into town and called Alice. He wanted to apologize. She wasn’t in the mood.
“You better get back here right now,” she declared.
“Alice told me that she was turning me in for the murders if I didn’t move back to Macks Creek immediately,” said Jeffrey, “and stay with her.”
The next morning, October 12, Jeffrey drove to a pawnshop in Elkins and sold both his .45-caliber pistols, including the one that he had used to kill the Averys. He had tried to switch the barrel on the murder weapon with another pistol that Damon owned. That would have made it difficult for police to link the handgun through ballistic tests with the Averys’ deaths. But the two barrels were not interchangeable.