by Pete Earley
In contrast to such graphic testimony, Dray and Lawson called a friend of Cheryl’s, who described the Averys in loving terms. “We wanted to make certain,” LaTourette later said, “that the jurors realized that five human beings had been destroyed. We wanted them to see them as people, not just faceless victims.”
On the second day of Alice’s trial, Lawson and Dray began introducing evidence about Alice and her role as “mother” of the group. Debbie Olivarez was that day’s star witness. She recalled how Alice frequently chastised Jeffrey’s followers, how she was his personal spy, how she constantly pushed the idea that Jeffrey was a prophet. “Alice was,” Debbie testified, “Jeff’s right-hand man in a lot of things. She was his confidante . . . . She would clarify things for Jeff. . . . “ It would have been impossible for Alice not to have known about the murders, Debbie said. She recalled how Jeffrey had talked about the best way to kill the Averys and how Alice had suggested that they find out whether Becky had started menstruation so Jeffrey would know whether to rip her guts open or bash her head against a wall. Debbie recounted how Alice had hurriedly left the farm on April 17 after eating dinner with the Averys before the murders. She had taken Jason, Kristen, and Caleb with her to buy picnic tables, Debbie said, but had called the farm before coming home to ask if “the company was gone.” Debbie had talked to Alice on the telephone that night and she said that Alice knew exactly what was happening in the barn.
“Who, if anyone,” Lawson asked Debbie, “could have prevented the murders?”
“Alice,” Debbie replied, looking directly at her, “could have.”
Alice grabbed her mouth and announced that she was ill. Mitrovich recessed court.
On the third day of testimony, Sharon Bluntschly told jurors that Alice was lazy and expected to be “treated like a queen” by the group. On the day that the Averys were murdered, Alice was almost gleeful, she said. “Tonight’s the night for the Averys,” Sharon quoted Alice as saying.
The prosecution felt jurors had heard enough. Dray and Lawson rested their case.
The defense’s main witness was Alice. Looking frail and weighing barely 100 pounds, some 120 pounds less than when she had been arrested only six months earlier, Alice testified for four hours. She told jurors that Jeffrey had lied to her repeatedly during their nineteen-year marriage. She talked about his sexual affair when he worked at the Lake of the Ozarks Hospital and told how he had pushed her so hard that her spleen had ruptured. “I was afraid of Jeff,” she said, “because I knew he had the potential to be very violent. But I also was very much in love with him.” But Alice did not go into great detail about her marriage and she mentioned nothing at all about her sexual experiences with Jeffrey. She had been too embarrassed to reveal the details of sex life with Jeffrey to her two male attorneys, she later said. She wasn’t certain that anyone would believe her.
When Jeffrey first mentioned killing ten of his followers, Alice said she had confronted him.
Alice: I went to him and I said, “Are you really saying that you’re going to kill people?” And he said, “No, no, no, this is just a test of faith. I’m not going to do anything, don’t worry about it.” He said, “This is an Abraham and Isaac situation.”
Question: What do you mean by Abraham and Isaac situation?
Alice: Abraham was a prophet who was commanded to sacrifice his only son. He took his son up on the altar and was going to sacrifice him, and at the last moment the Lord said, “You don’t have to sacrifice him.” That’s what Jeff was telling me. Nothing was going to happen. This was just a test of faith like Abraham’s faith had been tested . . .
Question: At that time did you believe that Jeffrey would kill ten people?
Alice: No, I didn’t think he would kill anybody.
The fact that Jeffrey had decided to spare the lives of Dennis, Tonya, Molly, Richard, and Sharon further convinced her, Alice testified, that Jeffrey wasn’t serious about killing the Averys.
When asked by her attorney to explain why she had left the farm on April 17 after eating dinner with Averys, Alice insisted that she had simply gone to run an errand. She had called the farm later that night—not because she was afraid to come home until the murders were done as Debbie implied—but because she wanted to see if Jeffrey needed her to bring him anything from town. She was completely unaware, she testified, that Jeffrey was actually going to murder the family. Alice’s attorneys were happy with her testimony. They felt that she had made a good impression. As soon as they finished their gentle questioning, prosecutor Dray was on her feet. “Mrs. Lundgren,” she declared, “you’re a liar!”
If Alice had been terrified of Jeffrey, why hadn’t she turned him in on April 18 when FBI agents and Chief Yarborough arrived at the farm to ask about the temple takeover? If Alice was a battered wife, as she claimed, then why did Sharon and Debbie testify that they had never seen Jeffrey physically abuse Alice, but they had seen Alice hit, scratch, kick, and punch him? Finally, Dray asked, how was it possible that Alice was the only adult at the farm on the night of April 17 who didn’t know what was going to happen after the Avery family finished their “last supper”?
Dray: Yes or no, nobody told you?
Alice: No one told me.
Dray: Nobody told the group’s “mother” on April seventeenth, “Holy schmoly, mom, do you know what dad’s planning to do tonight?” Nobody told you that, right?
Alice: No, nobody told me . . .
Dray: Let me run through this again. Richard Brand, Sharon Bluntschly, Deborah Olivarez, Susie and Ron Luff . . . Of the people who were there when the Averys came to eat dinner at your table, everybody knew it was going to be their last supper but you. Is that what you’re telling us?
Alice: (no response)
Dray: Yes or no?
Alice: Yes, everyone knew but me.
Mocking Alice, Dray began duck-walking toward the courtroom door, shouting her next question over her shoulder.
Dray: And so after dinner when you left to go to the Makro Department Store, you said, “I’m just going to Makro. I’m just going to buy picnic tables. I’ll see you in a little while.” Is that right?
Alice: Yes.
In closing arguments to the jury, defense attorney Gibson reminded jurors that Alice hadn’t been at the farm when the murders took place. He claimed that Alice had been mentally and emotionally abused by Jeffrey to the point where she was his pawn. “I didn’t know Hitler, but I think Jeffrey was right up next to him,” he said.
Prosecutor Lawson picked up on the same theme when it was her turn to speak. If Jeffrey resembled Hitler, she told jurors, then Alice mirrored Josef Mengele, the notorious “angel of death” at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. “She was just as cold and calculating and wacko as her husband,” Lawson charged.
The seven women and five men on the jury deliberated two days. Alice felt that was a good sign. She hoped that they were deadlocked. But on August 1, when the jury reached a verdict and filed into Judge Mitrovich’s courtroom, Alice’s hopes were quickly destroyed. The jurors found Alice guilty of all fifteen charges filed against her. Not only did the jury decide that Alice had “conspired” to commit aggravated murder, they also found her guilty of “complicity”. Conspiracy meant that Alice had agreed with others to kill the Averys. Complicity meant that she had actively helped commit the murders even though she wasn’t at the farm. The final five counts filed against Alice were for kidnapping. Alice’s actions, the jury said, had deprived the Averys of their freedom to leave the farm on April 17 by use of deception. Dray and Lawson had won a complete victory. They hugged each other and cried out when the verdict was read. Alice remained stone-faced.
In a last-ditch attempt to help their client, Alice’s attorneys offered Judge Mitrovich a psychological evaluation of Alice before sentencing that said “Alice’s involvement in criminal behavior was entirely secondary to her subservience to her husband.” But Mitrovich was unmoved. On August 29, he sentenced Alice to the ma
ximum prison term possible, a total of 150 years. She would not be eligible for parole until she served 115 years of the sentence.
“Good luck,” he told her.
As Alice was being taken out of the courtroom, she suddenly stopped in the hallway and was quickly mobbed by reporters and television crews. During the next ten minutes, she read a statement that she had written the night before.
“My name is Alice Elizabeth Lundgren,” she said. “I am not Josef Mengele and I am not the angel of death.” Alice insisted that she was innocent and she lambasted Judge Mitrovich for not permitting her attorneys to call expert witnesses who could describe battered women’s syndrome. “This whole process has not been so much about law or justice or truth,” she said, “it has been about political fame and fortune. . . .” She accused LaTourette of cutting deals in order to get “the bigger fish-plea bargains that will allow for the women, who last had the opportunity to save the lives of Cheryl, Trina, Becky, and Karen, to serve very little prison time if any for saving themselves rather than the children.” Alice’s most heated criticism, however, was directed at Dray and Lawson. “The departure of accepted courtroom decorum displayed by the prosecutor as she screamed and shouted in my face; ‘Holy schmoly, mom!’ or ‘Mrs. Lundgren, you are a liar’ gave the jury a perfect example of a woman realizing that she had only exchanged batterers. . . . No matter how much pain or destruction or peril that has filled my life—no matter how tragic the deaths of Dennis, Cheryl, Trina, Becky, and Karen—that was not, nor ever could it be reason for me to accept the prosecutors’ suggestion that ‘Alice should have blown Jeff’s brains out’ as was offered in the closing remarks by the prosecutor.
I find it ironic that the suggestion of aggravated murder was offered as an acceptable course of action to have prevented aggravated murder. That would have made me equal to Jeff Lundgren which can never be because I am not a cold-blooded murderer—he is.”
Alice broke down once while reading the statement when she mentioned Karen Avery. But she quickly regained her composure, and when she came to the end of her text, she smiled and said, “My life has taken on a whole new definition over the past several months. In a very real sense, I have known more freedom within the walls of the Lake County jail than I have known for years . . . . The correctional officers ... have treated me with fairness and human dignity, which is a new and refreshing experience as compared to the dynamics of the group that I came out of.”
As soon as she finished, deputies hurried her to jail.
During the next few days, reporters questioned jurors about their verdict and “Maximum” Mitrovich’s sentence. They learned that the deciding factor in the jury verdict was not the judge’s actions, the prosecutors’ verbal attacks, or even the witnesses’ descriptions. The jury had convicted Alice because of Alice’s own words.
Alice had insisted that she hadn’t known Jeffrey planned to kill the Averys on April 17. Yet after Alice was arrested in San Diego on January 7, she had made a statement to agent Van Haelst during her thirty-eight-minute videotaped conversation that had come back to haunt her. The complete video was shown during her trial, and it was Alice’s own voice, her own words, reverberating inside the darkened courtroom that jurors later said convinced them that she was a liar.
“Did you know why the Averys were coming to the farm that night?” Van Haelst had asked.
“I suspected that it was the sacrifice,” Alice had replied.
“Had he talked to you about that?”
“Not—Yes and no. It was like—not directly, but indirectly.” And then Alice had said the words that few in the courtroom would ever forget.
“You had to be stupid not to know what he was up to.”
Chapter 55
STEVEN LeTourette had been halfway through Scott Turow’s novel Presumed Innocent when the bodies of the Averys were discovered, and on August 23, LaTourette followed the advice of his fictional counterpart Rusty Sabich, who explained in the opening pages that all successful prosecutors looked a defendant directly in the eye when accusing them of a crime. During his opening statement to the jury in the case of State of Ohio v. Jeffrey D. Lundgren, LaTourette pointed his finger at Jeffrey’s face and called him a conman and murderer. Jeffrey flinched, looked away, and avoided eye contact with LaTourette during the rest of the trial.
“The evidence in this case will reflect,” LaTourette declared, “that during the spring of 1989, in or near Davis, West Virginia, Jeffrey Don Lundgren turned to a woman by the name of Deborah Sue Olivarez ... and said, ‘You know, death stinks, but I guess I will have to get used to it.’
“The evidence in this case, ladies and gentlemen,” LaTourette continued, “will bring home the smell of death. . . . Unfortunately, it will bring it within the four walls of this courtroom.’’
For forty minutes, LaTourette dramatically explained how Jeffrey, “through a series of sideshow and medicine-show miracles and tortured scripture, set up schemes and manipulated good, God-fearing people in a way that would have made Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker swell with pride.
“Over time, he conned these people into supporting him and his family financially,” LaTourette thundered, “into permitting him to act out his sexual fantasies, and ultimately in participating with him in the death of five people.”
LaTourette’s oratory, which his fellow attorneys and local reporters later described as the best that they had ever heard him deliver, was followed by a flat, three-minute response by assistant public defender Charles Grieshammer. Yet it was Grieshammer’s brief comment that led the five o’clock newscasts that night.
“Jeffrey Lundgren did shoot and kill Dennis, Cheryl, Trina, Rebecca, and Karen Avery,” Grieshammer said, declaring his client’s guilt before the prosecution had called even a single witness. “We’re not going to dispute that.”
It had been Paul LaPlante who had decided to tell the jurors upfront that Jeffrey was a killer. “We weren’t going to insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending that Jeffrey wasn’t guilty,” he later said. LaPlante’s plan was to hurry through the first stage of the murder trial. He had seen how Dray and Lawson had sensationalized the Averys’ deaths in Alice’s case, and he hoped to avoid the grisly details of the murders. Instead of focusing on the Averys, LaPlante wanted jurors to pay attention to Jeffrey. During the second phase of the trial, LaPlante hoped to convince the jury that Jeffrey had been emotionally abused as a child to the extent that he deserved the jurors’ pity.
Just as in Alice’s trial, the first day of testimony began with ghastly accounts of how the bodies were exhumed. At one point, jurors were taken in a bus to the farm and shown the pit where the Averys had been killed. Jeffrey did not go along on that trip. He stayed in his cell and read his scriptures.
On day two, the prosecution hauled Jeffrey’s arsenal into court. Wooden boxes filled with ammunition, stacks of rifles, and numerous pistols were paraded before the jury. Photographs of the huge .50- caliber rifle that Jeffrey had bought appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer the next morning and were sent over the Associated Press wires. LaTourette was skillfully reconstructing the crime for the jury and the media.
LaPlante and Grieshammer didn’t bother to question most of the prosecution’s witnesses. They simply sat and listened to the testimony. Jeffrey spent the first two days of his trial reading passages from the Bible, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants. Oftentimes, he didn’t even bother looking at the parade of witnesses being called. Only once did he show any interest. When photographs of the Averys taken during the autopsies were introduced as evidence, Jeffrey pushed his scriptures aside and carefully examined each picture for several minutes after LaTourette handed them to LaPlante and Grieshammer to review. “When he studied those pictures I got really pissed,” LaTourette said later. “I hated him more and more because it was clear that he was admiring his handiwork.”
Judge Martin O. Parks’ courtroom contained one large table, which was used by both the prosecut
ion and the defense. A podium in the center separated the two sides. LaTourette and LaPlante took the chairs closest to the lectern. Their assistants sat beside them and then, at the ends of the table, were the chairs that Chief Yarborough and Jeffrey used. Because of this arrangement, Yarborough and Jeffrey found themselves facing one another. Yarborough quickly made it his habit to stare directly at Jeffrey, hoping to make him nervous.
LaTourette’s star witness, Richard Brand, testified on day three. Before he arrived, Yarborough and LaTourette took a roll of gray duct tape-the same kind used to bind and gag the Averys—and tore off four strips. They used the tape to make a rectangular outline on the courtroom floor. When it came time for Richard to describe the murders, LaTourette told him to step down from the witness stand and demonstrate for the jury exactly where he had put Dennis Avery when he and Danny had lowered him into the pit. Brand walked over to the taped outline, stepped inside, and dropped to his knees. He was only a few feet from Jeffrey. Holding the murder weapon in his hand, LaTourette left the podium and walked behind Richard. He dramatically raised the gun, pointing it directly at Richard’s back.