Prophet of Death_The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings

by Pete Earley

  The next morning, Jeffrey drove Alice to the local welfare office, where she spent the day applying for financial aid. Once again, she used Jeffrey’s real name on all the forms. Twice, she called the motel on a pay phone, but both times the operator told her that the line to the room was busy. “I knew he was talking to Kathy again. I knew he was figuring out a way to get that bitch out to California.” Alice collected some $300 in food stamps that day and another $938 through a program designed to help homeless families find housing to rent. When she got back to the motel, Jeffrey ordered pizza for everyone to celebrate her “looting” of the Gentiles. He and Alice then went to a nearby Laundromat where they played video games until 2:00 A.M. “Jeffrey got the highest score on the machine,” Alice gushed later. “He was just a tremendous player.”

  During the next few days, Jeffrey sent Danny to find a job. He put Damon in charge of baby-sitting for the other Lundgren children. Alice slept during the day and watched television. Jeffrey, meanwhile, spent his mornings and afternoons exercising in a nearby gym and playing video games at the Laundromat. At night, Jeffrey taught Damon, Danny, and Alice various new scriptural interpretations. At one point, Jeffrey talked about recruiting motorcycle-gang members as followers. They would be tough enough to perform the killing that God was about to order, he said. Jeffrey told Alice that gang members frequented striptease bars in San Diego and he said that God wanted him to begin visiting all of the nude nightclubs to search for new disciples.

  Jeffrey also announced that the third seal in Revelation had been opened while the group was in West Virginia, although no one except for him realized it. The third seal read:

  And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand ...

  The “pair of balances,” Jeffrey explained, was a cryptic reference to Alice and Kathy. “The rider of the black horse is carrying a pair of balances—in other words, he has two wives.” That verse, Jeffrey told Alice, was additional proof that God wanted him to be married to both women.

  Alice didn’t believe him, but instead of challenging Jeffrey’s interpretation, Alice asked him about the one-year deadline that he had imposed for opening all of the seals. He had told everyone that God expected all seven seals to be opened within twelve months once the Averys were murdered. It had been nine months since the sacrifice and Jeffrey was still on the third seal. Jeffrey had a ready explanation. Because he was divine, like God, he spoke chiastically. “In order for you to really understand what I am saying, you have to use the pattern to diagram my exact words,” he said. Had anyone done that while the group was in the wilderness, they would have discovered that his words didn’t always say what they seemed to say. They contained a hidden message and, in this case, that message was that there was no deadline for opening the seven seals.

  Near the end of their first full week in San Diego, Jeffrey told Alice that God had instructed him to spend three nights on the beach. During one of those nights, the Mormon prophet Nephi would appear and tell him how to open the fourth seal. He announced that he was going out that very night to see if Nephi would appear. He took Damon with him to a nearby public beach. They stayed out until 3:00 A.M. and then returned to the motel to sleep. The next night, Jeffrey said that God wanted him to go alone. He didn’t come back to the motel until nearly noon on the next day.

  “Did Nephi appear?” Alice asked, when Jeffrey dragged in.

  “No,” Jeffrey replied. “I have to go out again tonight. It must be the night.”

  Alice hurried outside and looked in the back of the truck. “I found a mattress in the back and it was covered with sand.”

  Returning to the motel room, Alice asked: “Did you and Nephi roll around in the back of the truck?”

  Jeffrey said that he had gotten tired and had taken the mattress along so that he could rest.

  “Jeffrey,” she replied, “you’re lying again. It’s Kathy. You brought her out here! You’re hiding her somewhere. Now where is that bitch?”

  Jeffrey denied that Kathy was in San Diego. “She’s in Iowa,” he insisted. But Alice wouldn’t believe him. They argued until Jeffrey finally left the room. When he returned, he announced that God had spoken to him. God was so infuriated by Alice’s constant rebellion that He had decided not to send Nephi to meet with Jeffrey. Instead, God wanted Jeffrey to humble Alice.

  “You must sleep on the floor for the next three nights at the foot of your lord and master,” Jeffrey announced. “This is what God demands.”

  That night, while Jeffrey slept on the motel bed, Alice lay on the floor, without a blanket or pillow.

  “It was at that time that I became completely and totally, absolutely convinced that there was no validity to anything that Jeffrey said or taught,” Alice said later. “Everything was a lie from the time we had met in college twenty years earlier.”

  The next morning, Alice challenged Jeffrey. “I told him pointblank that I didn’t think he had ever had any revelatory experience, that I thought he’d made up everything in his mind and that the only god that he listened to was Jeff Lundgren.

  “I began telling him what a lousy provider he had been for me and the kids, and all of a sudden, he became extremely kind and compassionate and he started crying. He said, ‘Alice, I haven’t treated you as I ought. I haven’t provided for you as I ought.’ And he began to beg me for forgiveness. He said, ‘Please let me make love to you.’ That was the first time since we had left West Virginia that he had asked to do anything for me. I said, ‘No, Jeffrey, it’s too late.’ I got up and I walked out the motel door and he came running after me. He followed me the entire time that I was walking and he begged me not to leave him.

  “He said, ‘Alice, if you ever left me, I’d die. You’ve got to believe in me. You’ve got to believe I am who I say I am, otherwise I can’t go on. I need you.”’

  Chapter 51

  CHIEF Yarborough was at home helping Gail get ready for a New Year’s Eve party when the telephone rang at 3:30 P.M. on December 31, 1989. Most of Gail’s relatives were coming over later that afternoon to begin celebrating. But within seconds after Yarborough picked up the receiver, he forgot about the night’s festivities. An agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was on the line calling from Kansas City with quite a story. Richard Van Haelst had just spent more than two hours interviewing a man who claimed that five murder victims were buried in a barn outside Kirtland.

  Who, Yarborough asked, was Van Haelst’s informant?

  “Keith Johnson,” the agent replied.

  Who was supposedly buried in the barn?

  A family named the Averys, Van Haelst said. Dennis, Cheryl, and their three daughters.

  Yarborough didn’t have to ask who the alleged murderer was, but Van Haelst volunteered the name. The triggerman, he said, was Jeffrey Lundgren.

  “I felt sick,” Yarborough later remembered. “I hoped like hell that Johnson was lying.”

  Van Haelst told Yarborough that a friend of Keith’s had contacted another BATF agent, Larry Scott, that morning and had arranged for them to meet just before noon. Keith had told Van Haelst and Scott upfront that one of the main reasons why he had come forward was because he wanted the BATF to track down his wife and to arrest Jeffrey. There was a chance, the agent said, that Keith had concocted the entire murder story just to find Kathy and get Jeffrey into trouble. At least that was the theory of the Cleveland BATF field office. Before contacting Yarborough, Van Haelst had called an agent there who had quickly dismissed Keith’s story as the rambling of a jilted spouse who was simply bored on New Year’s Eve. Van Haelst had called Yarborough, in part, out of frustration. He was trying to find someone willing to go out to the barn and at least do some snooping around.

  As soon as Yarborough finished talking to Van Haelst, he telephoned Ron Andolsek and asked him to contact the Averys’ relatives. Before anyone scurried out to
the barn, Yarborough wanted to make certain that Dennis and Cheryl were definitely missing.

  “I really hoped Keith was lying,” the chief said. “I hoped it was nothing but a hoax.”

  The next morning, New Year’s Day, Andolsek told Yarborough that none of the Averys’ relatives had heard from the family since April. No one was certain where they had gone, although Cheryl Avery’s mother had gotten a note that mentioned Wyoming.

  Yarborough’s first impulse was to race out to the barn and begin digging. But he held himself back. He wanted to move cautiously. If there were five bodies buried in the barn, the Kirtland Police Department was going to be involved in the biggest investigation in its history and Yarborough didn’t want to do anything spur of the moment that might result in Jeffrey or anyone else being found not guilty later because of a legal technicality. The chief told Andolsek that before either of them could search the barn, they had to get written permission from its owner, Stan Skrbis, Jeffrey’s former landlord. That was going to take much of the day.

  There was another reason why Yarborough wasn’t in a rush. “I didn’t want those bodies to be there. I blamed myself. I thought, ‘Damn, Jeffrey turned on his own group. We stopped him from hitting the temple so he turned on his own people.’ I kept thinking, ‘What if I’d done this or done that?’ We’d never really paid much attention to finding the Averys. They didn’t seem like they were part of Jeffrey’s plan.”

  By the time that Andolsek got all of the paperwork signed it was 10:30 P.M. He and Yarborough met outside the empty farmhouse. The last time that both of them had been at the farm together was April 18, the day after the alleged murders. That fact grated on the chief. One day! One stinking day late!

  No one had rented the farm since Jeffrey had fled owing Skrbis several months’ back rent. The front yard was overgrown with weeds. The apple trees needed tending. Yarborough and Andolsek flipped on their flashlights. The electricity in the barn had been turned off months earlier. The door creaked when they pulled it open. Their lights spotlighted a miscellany of junk abandoned inside the barn. Jeffrey and his followers had discarded everything they couldn’t take with them to West Virginia, tossing it aside like litter carelessly dropped from a fast-moving car. Cardboard boxes over-flowing with books, green plastic trash bags bursting with clothing, letters, coats, toys, pieces of furniture—the scene reminded Andolsek of a giant Goodwill box that hadn’t been emptied for months.

  Keith had told the federal agents that the Averys were buried on the east side of the barn. It took Yarborough and Andolsek several minutes to make their way through the debris and several more to clear a spot so they could see if there were any signs of digging. When they had at last removed enough trash to investigate the floor, Yarborough reached down and swept away a layer of straw.

  “Hey, Ron,” he announced, “this is concrete under here. He couldn’t have buried anyone under this.”

  Yarborough felt a quick elation. Maybe Keith was lying. Maybe he had concocted the story. The two men shone their lights across the barn. Something moved. Yarborough flashed his light in the direction of the sound. A terrified chicken flew toward him. The chief jumped and then laughed.

  Andolsek wondered: Could Keith had been confused? Or had Van Haelst given them the wrong directions? Maybe the bodies were buried in the west corner. The two men worked their way through the debris. Yarborough counted three abandoned cars piled with boxes. In the western portion of the barn, they found a room that was packed with so much junk that neither of them could squeeze inside to look around. The hope that Yarborough had felt dissipated. There was too much garbage piled inside. It looked as if someone was intentionally trying to hide something there.

  They were going to need help clearing the room of debris. They’d have to wait for daylight, Yarborough said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.” As they walked back toward the door, Andolsek shone his flashlight on a box and spotted a formal-looking document. He picked it up. High School Diploma, it said. Cheryl Clisby. Class of 1965.

  BATF agent Scott telephoned Yarborough the next morning to see if he’d found the bodies. The barn’s floor was concrete, the chief explained. Scott offered to send a drawing that Keith had made of the barn. It showed exactly where the grave was located. Even if the bodies had been removed, there should still be some sign of digging.

  “What’s your fax number?” Scott asked.

  Yarborough paused. The Kirtland Police Department didn’t own a fax. The chief said he’d find someone else in Kirtland who could receive it.

  Yarborough was waiting in his office for the diagram to be delivered when he looked up and saw Dennis Patrick walk into the police station.

  “I just stopped by to let you know my wife and I aren’t in Jeffrey’s group anymore,” Dennis volunteered. “Neither is Debbie Olivarez.”

  The three of them had quit, Dennis said, and had returned to Kirtland with a U-Haul truck because they wanted to retrieve some of their belongings from the barn. Would it be okay, he asked, if the three of them went onto the property to reclaim their things?

  Yarborough could tell from Dennis’s demeanor that he didn’t know that Keith Johnson had tipped off the BATF to the murders. “Why don’t you come back later this afternoon?” the chief suggested. Yarborough said that he’d have an officer escort them onto the property so they wouldn’t be accused of trespassing.

  Dennis thanked him, offered the chief his hand, and walked out of the station without any clue about what was happening. The chief grabbed his telephone and called FBI Agent Robert Alvord. Once again, Yarborough was covering himself. He wanted Alvord to be there when Dennis returned later that day.

  Alvord and the drawing from the BATF arrived at about the same time. Yarborough and Andolsek had been right. The grave was in the western half of the barn in the room strewn with trash.

  At 3:00 P.M., Dennis returned to the station with Tonya and Debbie, who waited outside. The three of them had contacted Shar Olson and were planning on spending the night at her apartment. As soon as Dennis entered the police station, Yarborough and Alvord began questioning him about the Averys. Dennis panicked. He didn’t want to appear uncooperative, but he didn’t want to tell them the truth either. He was soon tripping over his own lies. Thirty minutes later, Tonya came looking for Dennis. When she saw him, she knew something was wrong. He looked terrified. Hurrying back outside, Tonya raced over to Debbie.

  “They know!” she said.

  “Oh, my God!” Debbie replied.

  Dennis was shaking when he came out of the station. “We’ve got to find an attorney,” he said. “We’ve got to talk to a lawyer.” The trio rushed back to Shar’s apartment, but they refused to tell her what was going on. Dennis telephoned a local attorney who belonged to the RLDS Church. The attorney told them to get back to Missouri as quickly as they could. They left immediately, leaving Shar completely bewildered. None of them had mentioned the murders to her. Once they were a few miles outside Kirtland, Dennis stopped at a pay phone and called Greg. “They know,” he said. Someone had tipped off the police without warning everyone else.

  “Keith!” Greg said. It had to be Keith.

  Greg promised to alert the others. They’d meet at Minsky’s, a pizza place just outside Independence. The Patricks and Debbie drove all night. They met Ron, Susie, Greg, and Richard at the restaurant. No one invited Keith. Sharon wasn’t there either. By this time, she had returned to her parents’ house in Michigan and had just given birth to a daughter. Greg had called her and told her that Keith had squealed. He’d promised to call after the meeting and tell her what everyone was going to do. Once again, the group discussed what might happen to them, and then Ron suggested that they each contact an attorney. No one spoke for several minutes. As they looked around the table, each of them realized that once they left the pizza parlor they were on their own. Keith had been the first to jump ship. Who would be next to cut a deal?

  Back in Kirtland, Yarborough, Andolsek, and Alvord arrive
d at the barn at 9:00 A.M. on January 3 and began removing junk from the room where the grave was located. By four o’clock, they had removed enough for Andolsek to crawl inside. He made his way to one side of the room, where he spotted chunks of dried clay on several boxes.

  “Someone’s been digging here,” he yelled.

  All three men returned to the police station. Yarborough was now convinced that Keith’s story was true. He telephoned the chief of Kirtland’s Volunteer Fire Department and asked for his help. At seven o’clock that night, nearly a dozen firefighters assembled at the farm. They set up large floodlights to illuminate the barn and they began clearing debris from inside the room. Ron Andolsek had a firefighter videotape the entire operation. Within an hour, the room was clean. It was obvious where the grave was located. Everywhere else, the floor was hard clay, but the ground was soft where the bodies were buried. With Yarborough and Andolsek overseeing the exhumation, two firemen began digging. As soon as they overturned the first shovel of dirt, a stench rose from the ground. Within minutes, a putrid odor permeated the room. One of the men gasped for air, dropped his shovel, and rushed outside. Yarborough, Andolsek, and the others fought back the urge to vomit. The stench became so vile that the volunteer firemen began digging in shifts. Some could work only for a few minutes. Shortly after 9:00 P. M., one of the men unearthed a swatch of blue denim. He climbed into the hole and reached down with his hands to clear away the dirt. It was a hip turned sideways. The firefighter removed about twelve inches of dirt, revealing a man’s belt and what looked like the bottom of a faded plaid shirt.

  “That’s enough,” Yarborough said. There was no question now that Keith had told the truth. They had found one body. Yarborough ordered the firemen to stop digging. His small police department and the volunteer firefighters were unprepared for the job that Yarborough knew lay ahead. He told Andolsek to get everyone out of the barn and close off the area. Yarborough wanted an officer stationed at the barn round the clock. As soon as the chief was certain that no one would disturb the grave, he began calling various county officials. The Lake County Sheriffs Department had a lieutenant, Daniel Dunlap, who had received special schooling from the FBI on how to process a crime scene. Yarborough wanted his help. Lake County Prosecutor Steven C. LaTourette needed to be notified too. He would be in charge of filing charges against Jeffrey and the others. He’d also be the person responsible for making certain that they were convicted. Besides LaTourette, the county coroner needed to be contacted.