by Pete Earley
As she was speaking to Van Haelst, Jeffrey came out of the motel room and walked up to the pay phone next to the one that the undercover agent was using. He was calling Kathy.
Agent Van Haelst quickly asked the jogger if she could tell whether or not Jeffrey was armed.
“No!” she said, trying to hide her excitement.
Van Haelst decided to nab Jeffrey before he could get back into the motel and alert Damon and Alice. He ordered everyone to close in. Five agents raced up to the telephone booth and jerked Jeffrey outside. They shoved him onto the sidewalk where Van Haelst stuck his revolver next to Jeffrey’s head and announced that he was under arrest.
Within seconds, another team of agents led by Agent Lanny Royer burst through the door of Room 29. “Mommy! Mommy!” Caleb yelled. Kristen screamed. An agent knocked Alice down on the bed and hurried past her to Damon, who was standing near the bathroom. He was shoved down on the floor. Another agent pointed his gun at Alice, “Move, bitch, and I’ll blow your brains out!” They handcuffed Damon and dragged him onto the balcony. Alice was hustled out next. Inside, the agents found an AR-15 assault rifle, two .44 magnum revolvers that belonged to Damon and Jason, another pistol, and boxes of ammunition.
Just as Jeffrey was being put into the backseat of a car, he spotted Alice on the balcony.
“Good-bye, Alice!” he yelled.
Jeffrey, Alice, and Damon were taken to jail, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and issued white paper suits to wear. They were then taken to the BATF office where Van Haelst was waiting to question them.
At 6:50 P.M., Alice agreed to make a statement about the murders. She would later claim that Van Haelst had duped her into talking by threatening to send her children to a juvenile home if she didn’t cooperate. He denied her accusation.
During the short-videotaped confession, Alice told the agent that Jeffrey had killed the Averys. “The more Jeff learned,” she said, “the more he felt he had authority to do things. The more knowledge he attained, the more he thought it made him”—Alice paused, searching for just the right word. Van Haelst offered her one.
“Divine?” he said.
Alice nodded.
Alice put all of the blame on Jeffrey. She said he honestly believed that he was doing what God had commanded him to do, and when Van Haelst asked her why she hadn’t gone to the police, Alice said she was afraid that Jeffrey would kill her too.
After they finished, Van Haelst told Alice that Damon and Jeffrey wanted to speak to her. Damon came into the room first.
“It’s going to be okay, Mom,” he said. He kissed her cheek.
Jeffrey came in after Damon was gone. He bent down and looked at her. He told her that he loved her and that she should not lose faith in him. He was the last messenger. God would soon free him and he would free her. All she had to do was trust him, believe in him, not lose faith.
Jeffrey stood up to leave, and when he turned around, Alice noticed that the seam in the crotch of his jail-issued white paper overalls was torn. Jeffrey’s naked buttock peeked through the tear. As she watched him walk away, Alice couldn’t help herself. She suddenly began to laugh.
Chapter 53
ON the morning of January 4, while the bodies of the Avery family were being extracted in Kirtland, Keith Johnson telephoned Greg and Ron and urged them to turn themselves in. Keith would later claim that he had been told by agent Larry Scott that anyone who surrendered voluntarily before the bodies were exhumed would be given immunity from prosecution. But after the Averys were removed from the pit, there would be no deals made.
Greg’s father, Gerald Winship, had already hired a well-known Kansas City criminal attorney, John P. O’Connor, to represent his son, so Greg quickly disregarded Keith’s advice. Besides, what Keith said didn’t make sense to Greg. What difference would it make if someone confessed before the bodies were taken from the grave?
Ron was not nearly as skeptical. He and Susie had spoken to an attorney and had been warned repeatedly not to make any statements. But both of them trusted Keith. More important, they thought that turning themselves in was the right thing to do. Ron had been praying about it.
What they would not discover until much later was that Keith himself was worried about being prosecuted. Keith had assumed when he first came forward that the BATF would automatically grant him immunity in return for his help. Much to his horror, Keith discovered that Lake County Prosecutor Steven LaTourette was the only official who could make such a deal. The only thing that Scott and Van Haelst could do was to lobby LaTourette on Keith’s behalf, and they were going to do that only if he continued cooperating.
Regardless of Keith’s prodding, chances are Ron and Susie would have surrendered and confessed anyway. They thought of themselves as being righteous, godly people. Society and its laws were not as important as God’s commandments, and now that both of them realized they had been duped by Jeffrey, they wanted to clear their consciences. As children they had been taught that confession was the first step to receiving forgiveness. Shortly after 12:00 noon, Ron and Susie arrived at the BATF office in Kansas City ready to repent.
As required, Van Haelst explained Ron’s constitutional rights under the Miranda decision and asked him to sign a waiver of those protections. At 1:22 P.M. Ron did, and Van Haelst and Larry Scott immediately began grilling him. After two hours, Ron agreed to confess before a video camera in the BATF conference room. Van Haelst and Scott quickly set up their gear. At the beginning of the tape, Van Haelst twice warned Ron that anything he was about to say could be used against him in court.
“We’ve not made any promises and no threats have been made against you—is that correct?” Van Haelst asked.
“Yes . . . this is completely voluntary,” Ron said.
Van Haelst wanted to make certain that jurors understood Ron was not being misled. The agent knew that once Ron was formally charged, his attorney would try to keep the tape from being introduced as evidence.
During the next two hours, Ron gave a detailed account of Jeffrey’s teachings and how he had convinced the group that the Averys were wicked and needed to be sacrificed. In a nasal monotone, between puffs on cigarettes, Ron candidly recounted his actions on the night of the murders and those of the other group members. Only once did he show any emotion. When he recalled how he had jabbed Dennis Avery with the electric stun gun, first in the hip, then in the neck, and finally in the chest, Ron’s voice cracked.
“He [Dennis] was in a lot of pain,” Ron said, looking down at the floor, fighting back tears.
“Take your time,” said Van Haelst sympathetically. Agent Scott leaned forward with some tissues.
Ron sat upright, as if he were offended. “Well,” he said, quickly regaining his composure, “that’s fine.” He pushed the tissues out of the way and continued in his southern Missouri twang.
As soon as Ron finished, the two agents interviewed Susie Luff, who proved just as candid and equally composed. Until the two of them confessed, neither Van Haelst nor Scott had known exactly what had happened inside the barn on the night of the murders. Keith had told them what he thought had happened based on comments that Jeffrey and other group members had made after the killings. But Keith hadn’t been at the farm when the murders took place. More important, Keith hadn’t given them a clearheaded narrative. “The message that came through from Kansas City,” LaTourette said later, “was that Keith Johnson was a knucklehead. . . . He couldn’t tell the same story twice in the same way.”
After interviewing the Luffs, Van Haelst telephoned LaTourette and told him that a copy of their video confessions would be delivered to his office by 10:00 A.M. the next day. In return, LaTourette sent Van Haelst warrants over a fax machine so that he could arrest Ron and Susie. That night, a SWAT team from Independence arrested Dennis and Tonya Patrick, and Debbie Olivarez. Hoping to avoid a similar spectacle, Sharon turned herself in to the police in Bay City, Michigan. By this time, Richard Brand’s family had hired him an attorney, Ch
arles Atwell. He and Greg’s lawyer arranged for their clients to surrender the next day at the BATF office.
LaTourette slipped the Luff videotape into a player on January 5 when he received it and called in the top members of his staff to view it. What he saw sickened him. “What always bothered me about Luff and the others who eventually confessed and made videotapes was their total lack of emotion,” LaTourette said later. “They would become real teary-eyed and boohoo when they talked about how Jeff had pimped them and led them down the path, but there was no show of emotion when they talked about killing these little kids.”
A few hours later, LaTourette showed the Luffs’ confessions to a grand jury meeting in the Lake County Courthouse located in Painesville, the county seat, about twelve miles east of Kirtland. The jury immediately issued indictments charging Jeffrey, Ron, Greg, Richard, Damon, and Danny with aggravated murder, punishable by death in Ohio’s electric chair. Because Dennis Patrick hadn’t taken part in the actual killings, he was charged with complicity to commit aggravated murder, the same charge levied against Alice, Susie, Tonya, Debbie, Sharon, and Kathy. That charge carried a penalty of up to life in prison. LaTourette had planned on indicting Keith Johnson on a complicity charge, but Van Haelst urged him to grant Keith immunity because of his help. LaTourette resisted at first, but finally agreed. It was the first of several controversial decisions that the young prosecutor would make.
LaTourette had been the prosecutor in Lake County for only fourteen months when the bodies of the Averys were discovered. But he had already earned a reputation as a tough and shrewd courtroom fighter. Born and reared in Cleveland Heights, one of Cleveland’s more posh neighborhoods, LaTourette had grown up in a rock-solid Republican family where politics dominated after dinner conversations and being a member of the high school debate squad was more prized than being a star athlete. When LaTourette was just a toddler, his grandmother had taken him with her to deliver campaign literature for a Republican congressional candidate. He would later remember how he had walked up and down his neighborhood in 1960 pulling his red wagon filled with pamphlets for Richard Nixon’s ill-fated race against John Kennedy. Politics came naturally. After high school graduation, LaTourette followed his girlfriend, much to his parents’ dismay, to the University of Michigan. She was Jewish; he was Methodist. But the romance eventually faded, and after he graduated in 1976, LaTourette returned to Cleveland where he got a job as a shipping clerk and attended law school at night, earning his degree from Cleveland Marshall College of Law in 1979. Laourette had worked briefly for a prestigious Cleveland firm, but he found civil law tedious, and in 1980, he joined the Lake County Public Defender’s Office in Painesville at an annual salary of a mere $13,000 per year. He was hired by its chief attorney, R. Paul LaPlante, who quickly became LaTourette’s mentor and close personal friend.
At the time, the office was a struggling, shoestring operation. Funded with just enough taxpayers’ money to make do, the public defenders service got all of the cases that no one else wanted. “Our clients were the pains in the asses of the court system,” LaTourette recalled: the four-time losers, the poor, and the rapists, child molesters, and murderers that private attorneys refused to represent. When his grandmother asked how LaTourette could represent such “scumballs,” her grandson proudly declared that everyone was entitled to a fair trial. His stint as LaPlante’s right-hand man was LaTourette’s walk on the wild side. On Sunday mornings, he and the other under-paid public defenders would play softball and then pile into the ‘blue eagle,’ LaTourette’s gigantic 1977 Chrysler Newport, and drive to Fitzpatrick’s, a Cleveland bar, where they would thumb their noses at the establishment over mugs of cheap beer.
In 1982, LaTourette got married, resigned as a public defender, and took a job in a private firm in Painesville. Still, civil law bored him, so in 1984, he ran as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic district for the job of Lake County prosecutor. LaTourette lost by 15,000 votes out of the 47,000 that were cast. The local newspapers characterized it as a dismal effort, but LaTourette was amazed that he had collected 16,000 votes, considering that he had campaigned with only a handful of volunteers and $5,000 of his own money. During the next four years, LaTourette unmercifully hammered the incumbent in letters to the editor and worked at building alliances with the county’s few Republicans. When the prosecutor’s office mistakenly let an accused murderer go free, LaTourette publicized the blunder on billboards that proclaimed criminals were “getting away with murder” in Lake County. Although he was still considered an underdog in the 1988 race, LaTourette waged a fierce campaign by attacking the prosecutor for plea-bargaining cases rather than taking them to trial. On weekends, LaTourette stuffed campaign brochures into mailboxes and went door to door soliciting votes. To everyone’s surprise but his own, LaTourette won the $70,000-per-year prosecutor’s post by a 4,400 vote margin.
From the moment the Averys’ bodies were unearthed, LaTourette understood that his political future hinged on how well he prosecuted Jeffrey and his followers. LaTourette also knew that Jeffrey’s case was so controversial that he would be represented by the Lake County Public Defender’s Office, and that meant LaTourette would be facing his former boss, teacher, and friend, Paul LaPlante, in the courtroom.
At age forty-seven, Paul LaPlante was a bone-thin, white-bearded, scholarly man, who favored logic to courtroom hysterics. Born in rural Ontario, LaPlante had been rebellious as a teenager. “I didn’t get along with authority figures,” he recalled. Some said he still didn’t. As a teenager, he dropped out of high school, married, and supported himself by working as a meter reader. LaPlante soon realized that he was in a dead-end job, so he earned his high school diploma and went on to college. By 1966, LaPlante was working as a salesman for a Cleveland-based wire and copper company. Without any real reason, he decided to attend law school at night at Cleveland Marshall, the same college that Steven LaTourette would eventually attend.
It was there that LaPlante first was introduced to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and he became fascinated by the delicate balance between the state and each individual’s civil liberties. Before he could practice law in the United States, LaPlante was told that he had to renounce his Canadian citizenship, a move that the thirty- year-old thought unfair. “Once again, it made me look hard at what rights an individual in our society should have.” Despite his liberal bent, LaPlante joined the Lake County Prosecutor’s Office in 1973. One of his first big trials was the prosecution of two men who had murdered a gas-station attendant during a late-night robbery. LaPlante asked for the death penalty and got it. That case was one of the last successful death-penalty trials in Lake County.
Although he was an effective prosecutor, LaPlante felt uncomfortable in the role. When the county opened the Public Defender’s Office in 1979, he moved to the other side of the legal street by becoming its leading defense attorney. “I quickly discovered that most of my clients were guilty,” said LaPlante, “but the question was ‘Has the state done its job—can it prove that they are guilty?”’ Over the years, LaPlante had become convinced that the role of his office was not to get criminals set free, but to protect the individual rights of “the guilty and the innocent,” so that no matter what they were accused of, each defendant got a fair trial.
The morning after Jeffrey was arrested, LaPlante was on the telephone conferring with a public defender in San Diego about Jeffrey’s case.
Three days later, on January 10, San Diego Sheriffs Deputy Jimmy Sims spotted Jeffrey’s blue Nissan truck with Missouri license tags speeding down state highway 79 about forty miles northeast of San Diego. Sims motioned the truck over to the side of the road and arrested its occupants: Kathy Johnson and Danny Kraft, Jr., who each claimed to be someone else. They had been living in a tent in the mountain community of Santa Ysabel. After Jeffrey’s arrest, neither had known where to go. Kathy and Danny were taken to the same San Diego County jail where Jeffrey, Damon, and Alice were being
housed.
A short time later, Paul LaPlante arrived at the San Diego jail with his chief assistant, Charles R. Grieshammer. They had come to meet their new client. “Jeffrey was clearly very intelligent and very sincere in his religious convictions,” LaPlante recalled. During their first meeting that day, LaPlante didn’t mention the murders. LaPlante was used to his clients’ claiming they were innocent. He wanted Jeffrey to get to know him before they discussed the killings. He figured Jeffrey was more likely to tell the truth that way. The next morning, when LaPlante brought up the Averys, Jeffrey candidly admitted killing them. But he insisted that God had ordered him to do it. As they talked, LaPlante realized that if Jeffrey was asked in court about the murders, he would, as Jeffrey put it, “not deny what God had ordered me to do.”
LaPlante and Grieshammer returned to Ohio convinced that their client was going to be found guilty. But that didn’t mean that Jeffrey had to be sentenced to death. In Ohio, defendants facing the death penalty automatically received a two-stage trial. In the first, jurors decided whether or not the defendant was guilty. In the second, those same jurors decided whether the defendant deserved to be executed or, because of “mitigating” circumstances, should be granted mercy and receive a sentence of life in prison without parole. “We decided to focus all of our energies on the mitigating phase of the trial,” said LaPlante. “There was no question Jeffrey would be found guilty of killing the Averys.”
While LaPlante was returning from San Diego, his courtroom opponent, Steven LaTourette, was deciding how to prosecute the thirteen “cult cases.’’ LaTourette concluded early on that he needed someone from Jeffrey’s group to testify against the others. “I needed an eyewitness who had actually been in the barn during the killing.” His first thought was Ron Luff. Obviously, Ron knew what had happened. But LaTourette was reluctant to negotiate a plea bargain with Ron for several reasons. In effect, Ron had already hanged himself with his videotaped confession. It would make more sense to offer some other follower a deal, especially one who might be difficult to convict otherwise. Ron also didn’t have an attorney representing him and LaTourette didn’t want to negotiate directly with a defendant. Finally, LaTourette had been genuinely repulsed by Ron’s demeanor during his confession. The prosecutor couldn’t get the image out of his mind of Karen Avery’s foot falling when her corpse was lifted from the grave. Nor could he forget that it had been Ron Luff who had given Karen a piggyback ride to the barn on that night so that she could be murdered.