by Pete Earley
Is this how Dennis Avery was murdered? he asked.
Yes, Richard had replied.
LaTourette wanted the jurors to visualize exactly what had happened. He had another reason for reenacting the scene. He wanted everyone in the courtroom, including Jeffrey, to see that the gun was pointed at Richard’s back. Jeffrey had told his followers that he had looked Dennis in the eyes before shooting him. He had claimed that he had “pierced” Dennis Avery’s heart. But LaTourette told the jury that Jeffrey had lied. “Dennis Avery was shot twice in the back,” LaTourette proclaimed, “not in the chest, not in the heart.”
Richard told jurors that Jeffrey never showed any emotion when he executed the Averys. Even little Karen failed to bring any sign of remorse to his face.
Later, Jeffrey stared at Sharon and Debbie when they testified against him, but neither broke down. “Frequently, Jeffrey would tease in sexual overtones,” Debbie said. “He would come up behind me and say things like he was going to run his tongue up and down my body.” Once, she testified, Jeffrey joked about his scriptural teachings. “If this doesn’t work out, I guess I’ll become a pornographic writer,” he was quoted as saying.
After four days of testimony, LaTourette rested his case. He felt confident that he had proved that Jeffrey was a conman who had simply set out to steal the group’s money and had murdered the Averys to keep his other followers in line.
In keeping with LaPlante’s let’s-get-this-over-with strategy, the defense announced that it would not call any witnesses to defend Jeffrey. As expected, the jury quickly found him guilty of five aggravated murders and five counts of kidnapping.
On September 17 the “mitigation phase” of Jeffrey’s trial began. “It is now our show, our turn,” LaPlante nervously explained before the proceedings began.
“In Jeffrey’s first trial, we told you he killed this family,” Grieshammer explained to jurors during his opening remarks. “In this second trial, we will hopefully prove why.”
In chronological fashion, LaPlante and Grieshammer began to tell the “Jeffrey Lundgren story” from birth to the murders. Along the way, they gently suggested that Jeffrey alone wasn’t to blame for what had happened, that he too was a victim. They offered jurors two culprits: Jeffrey’s parents and the RLDS Church. Don and Lois Lundgren had refused to come to their son’s trial. Privately, they told friends that Jeffrey had “lost his mind.” Although Jeffrey was thirty-nine when he killed the Avery family, the defense suggested that Don and Lois had “emotionally abused” their son by being overly strict and demanding. The defense’s first witness, Jeffrey’s uncle George Harvey Gadberry, described Don as a “stern” father but admitted during cross-examination that he’d never seen any evidence that Jeffrey had been physically abused as a child. Mary Bennett, Jeffrey’s aunt, claimed that Don Lundgren “had such a hard look of sternness it would make anyone melt in their shoes.” But the worst example of punishment that she could cite happened when Jeffrey was three years old and popped a handful of salted peanuts in his mouth. Jeffrey hadn’t liked the taste and had started to spit them out when Don became angry at the waste of food. He forced Jeffrey to keep the peanuts in his mouth for more than thirty minutes, Bennett said. The jury did not seem too impressed by the tale.
Jeffrey’s high school friend, Sarah Stotts, said Jeffrey had felt inferior as a teenager because he could never live up to his parents’ expectations. But under cross-examination, Sarah admitted that she had no proof that Jeffrey had been mistreated at home.
When LaPlante and Grieshammer began calling witnesses to talk about Jeffrey’s religious bent, LaTourette felt relieved. The prosecutor was certain that the defense had failed to convince anyone that Jeffrey had come from an abusive home.
Jeffrey’s religious side was first described by Georgia Milliren, who fondly recalled how Jeffrey had taught Sunday school at Slover Park RLDS Church, but had eventually become disillusioned with the church. She was convinced that he was sincere. Much to the prosecution’s irritation, Keith Johnson testified for the defense and claimed that Jeffrey was not a con man. “Jeffrey came to the point where he believed his own lies,” said Keith. Even Kevin Currie, who had been terrified that Jeffrey was going to kill him, testified for the defense, saying that Jeffrey had built his life around his scriptures and was sincere in his teachings.
LaPlante called two expert witnesses to pull his case together. The first was William D. Russell, a professor of religion at Graceland College, who said that the Mormon religion was much more vulnerable to self-proclaimed prophets, such as Jeffrey, than other sects because of its belief in “continuing revelation” and acceptance of Joseph Smith, Jr., as a prophet. “I really don’t have any doubt that Jeffrey thinks he is a prophet,” said Russell, who added that he knew of at least twelve other self-proclaimed prophets who had broken from the RLDS just as Jeffrey had done. “He seems sincere,” Russell said.
The defense’s final expert witness, Dr. Nancy Schmidtgoessling, a Cincinnati psychologist, hammered home the point that Jeffrey was not a con man. She said that Jeffrey was drawn to religion because he felt inferior. Based on the eighteen hours that she had spent talking to Jeffrey and administering various psychological tests, Schmidtgoessling said that “Jeffrey was emotionally abused and did not feel accepted by his peers.”
As a child, “he did not fit in. The only way for him to relate to people was through religion. He found a niche in religion. He found a way to relate to people and his religion shaped and focused him.” The deeper Jeffrey delved into the scriptures, the more out of touch with reality he became.
In order to overcome his feelings of inadequacy, Jeffrey developed the opposite feelings. He developed a “grandiose” personality to the point that he came to believe that he was superior to everyone around him. Schmidtgoessling said that Jeffrey had an IQ of 124, which is 24 points higher than average, and had a much higher ability than most at memorizing material. Yet he couldn’t hold a job or support his family. He blamed everyone but himself for his failures. He became extremely narcissistic and retreated further and further into a world of his own making. As was typical of narcissistic personalities, Jeffrey found it difficult to appreciate the suffering of others and was preoccupied with his own power.
The reason why he hated the Averys was because Dennis Avery reminded Jeffrey of his own secret weaknesses, Schmidtgoessling theorized. Cheryl’s independence threatened Jeffrey’s masculinity. “In a sense, Lundgren was killing part of himself,” the psychologist testified. “In killing Dennis Avery, he was killing the parts of himself he detested. Jeffrey felt overrun by women. Dennis Avery had some of those same characteristics. He had a wife who pushed him around.”
Finally, Schmidtgoessling said that Jeffrey had “no insight at all” about his own personality. He had cocooned himself inside a religious fantasy world and, in doing so, had convinced himself that “God had commanded him to kill. He really believes it was right to kill those folks.”
When it was LaTourette’s turn to question Schmidtgoessling, the prosecutor was blunt.
“Is Jeffrey insane?” he asked.
“No,” Schmidtgoessling replied. Jeffrey knew that he was breaking the law when he killed the Averys.
That was all LaTourette wanted to know.
“What we had to present in mitigation was very subtle,” LaPlante said later. “We knew from the start that Jeffrey was not beaten as a child. There was no evidence that he had been raped or abused. There wasn’t really anything you could hang your hat on—where you could say, ‘Ah-ha, this is why Jeffrey turned out this way,’ but we felt there was enough there in his past and in his religion to make jurors see that there are degrees of illness and Jeffrey was way off the scale when it comes to mental disorders.”
It was now time for LaPlante to play his last card: Jeffrey. In Ohio, a defendant facing the death penalty was allowed to make a final plea to jurors before he was sentenced. The law was designed to give a convicted murderer the opportunit
y to confess his sins, apologize, and beg for mercy. But Jeffrey had something else in mind. He wanted to teach a scripture class. LaTourette was furious when he learned what Jeffrey had planned, but he couldn’t stop him. The prosecutor did, however, fuss over ground rules. “Lundgren wanted to use the lawyers’ podium,” LaTourette recalled. “I got mad. I was not going to dignify him by having him stand behind the podium. Paul [LaPlante] went nuts when I objected, but I didn’t care. This statement of his was nothing but a cheap way for him to get in a lot of crap.’’
LaTourette and LaPlante, the onetime close friends, argued bitterly in Judge Parks’s chambers until Parks sided with LaTourette. Jeffrey could speak, but not behind the podium.
Spectators began gathering outside the courthouse before dawn on September 19, to hear Jeffrey. It would be the first time that he had spoken publicly since his capture. The courtroom held only sixty-five persons and the media took up many of those seats. Jeffrey was scheduled to begin his statement shortly after 10:00 A.M.
The local News Herald had described Jeffrey before his trial in a one-inch-high headline as a SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL. A radio station had arranged to broadcast his speech “live” from the courthouse. A television camera in the courtroom stood ready to relay Jeffrey’s speech to five trucks parked in the town square, which would beam them to Cleveland and Kansas City television stations for news bulletins.
As the spectators waited, they talked among themselves and to reporters about Jeffrey. “I’d like to throw the switch that kills him,” said one bearded man, standing next to another who wore a white T-shirt with the words FRY JEFFREY written on it in black block letters.
“Why waste the electricity on him?” a third spectator volunteered. “Should take that son of a bitch and shoot ‘im in the head just like he shot ‘em three little Avery girls.”
Jeffrey had been awake all night in his cell scribbling his thoughts on a yellow legal pad. LaPlante and Grieshammer had urged him to keep his comments simple and concise, but he had ignored them. By the time he was brought to the courthouse, everyone was ready. Bailiff Glenn W. Kanaga, Sr., had held a lottery to determine which onlookers got seats. Sheriff’s deputies had paraded reporters and spectators through a metal detector to check for weapons. A local radio announcer was on the air, giving his listeners background material-much like a sports commentator during a pregame show. Judge Parks completed several routine courtroom chores and then told Jeffrey that he could begin. Jeffrey rose from his chair, glanced at his yellow legal pad one last time, cleared his throat, and faced the six men and six women who were to decide whether or not he should be put to death. He was wearing a light-brown jacket and brown polyester pants that Georgia Milliren had bought for him at a Salvation Army store. LaPlante’s wife had washed and ironed Jeffrey’s white shirt. His shoulder-length hair was pulled straight back and hung around his shoulders. In a calm, clear voice, Lundgren began.
“I am a prophet of God,” he said. “I am even more than that—much, much more.”
For five hours, Jeffrey spoke. He described his visions, quoted from the movie The Highlander, read numerous verses of scriptures, talked about chiasmus and the “pattern.” He never apologized for killing the Averys. “Prophets have been asked by the Lord to go forth and kill since the beginning of time,” he said. He ended his rambling discourse by quoting the Book of Mormon. “Repent ye, repent,” he told the jurors. “For the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”
The jury took less than two hours before recommending that Jeffrey be put to death. LaPlante and Grieshammer, both visibly upset, hurried from the courtroom without comment. LaTourette and Yarborough held a press conference.
Later that night, after Yarborough got home, he finally began to relax. Since the Averys’ bodies were found, Yarborough had spent all of his time helping LaTourette prepare his case. The chief’s dining-room table was covered with legal documents, newspaper clippings about religious cults, books about Mormonism.
“I feel good,” he said, “because I think we were able to show that Jeffrey is not a prophet. He is a fat coward who is terrified unless he can hide behind his religious books. He is a baby killer.”
Opening a box, Yarborough removed a well-worn, thick Bible. It had been Jeffrey’s before it was confiscated, and Yarborough had spent hours studying it. Yarborough opened the book to chapter 6 of Revelation and the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“Jeffrey made a mistake,” the chief said, “when he read about the fourth rider.” He read the verse aloud:
“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him . . .”
Yarborough grinned.
“Jeffrey wasn’t that rider,” the chief explained. The justice system, the state of Ohio, the prosecution was on that horse. “We are death and we are going to see to it that Jeffrey goes to hell for what he has done.”
That night, for the first time in months, Chief Yarborough got a good night’s sleep.
Chapter 56
ON September 21, 1990, Judge Parks officially sentenced Jeffrey to die in Ohio’s electric chair. Parks chose April 17, 1991, as the execution date because it was on April 17 that Jeffrey had murdered the Averys. The judge did not actually expect Jeffrey to be electrocuted that soon. Death penalty cases in Ohio are automatically appealed and it normally takes seventy-seven months for a case to work its way through the courts. LaTourette told reporters after the hearing that it would take ten years for Jeffrey to exhaust his legal appeals. Even then, there was a chance that his sentence might be commuted to life without parole. Ohio had not executed anyone since 1963.
Jeffrey was unruffled when Parks sentenced him. Later that afternoon, when LaPlante and Grieshammer went to speak with Jeffrey in the Lake County jail, they found him relaxed. The two attorneys weren’t. Grieshammer liked Jeffrey and was depressed. LaPlante felt irritated at the legal process. From the start, he had argued that Jeffrey couldn’t get a fair trial in Lake County because of the extraordinary publicity the murders had sparked. His suspicions were confirmed during voir dire, the jury-selection process, when many of the potential jurors admitted that they had already decided Jeffrey was guilty based on media accounts. Despite this, Judge Parks had refused to move the trial elsewhere. Instead, whenever prospective jurors said that they had already decided Jeffrey was guilty, Parks asked them if they could put aside their opinions and give Jeffrey a fair hearing. Nearly all had promised that they could. LaPlante wasn’t certain they had.
Jeffrey ended up comforting his attorneys. “I told them that everything was okay.”
What LaPlante and Grieshammer didn’t realize, Jeffrey later explained, was that his death sentence was preordained. “This is all going according to God’s game plan.’’
When Jeffrey was sentenced that morning, Judge Parks had made a point of saying that it was the “people of the state of Ohio” who had condemned Jeffrey to die. Parks was not personally doing it. Hadn’t Pontius Pilate tried to wash his hands when he sentenced Jesus Christ to death? Jeffrey asked. “The scriptures say that a prophet must be rebuked by the people and that is what the judge said. ‘The people of Ohio’ have condemned me and now God is justified in destroying them.
“You see, God’s tried all this before,” Jeffrey explained. The inhabitants on earth had been destroyed eight times by God, he said. “The ground you walk on is made of bones.” If people didn’t “repent” after hearing Jeffrey’s message, God would show Jeffrey how to continue opening the seven seals and the inhabitants of earth would be exterminated.
“God will simply start over.”
Several events that happened during his trial were chronicled in the scriptures, he said. One of the biblical names that Jeffrey had given Richard Brand while the group was in West Virginia was “Bel” and in the Bible Bel was forced by God to bow down. Durin
g his testimony, Richard had been told by LaTourette to leave the witness chair and get down on his knees in the mock pit that had been outlined on the courtroom floor. At that point, “Bel was forced to bow before me, his lord and master,” said Jeffrey.
Before Christ was crucified, he was mocked by his persecutors who lied about him. “LaTourette mocked and lied about me,” Jeffrey said. “I am not a conman and I didn’t shoot Dennis Avery in the back. I looked him in the eyes and shot him in his chest.”
Jeffrey insisted that LaTourette and the county coroners had intentionally identified the exit wounds in Dennis’s back as the entrance wounds in order to make Jeffrey look like a coward. “I shot Mr. Avery in the chest. All you have to do is look at the wounds. The holes in the chest are smaller than the ones in his back, which proves I shot him in the chest.”
But that was not what the wounds showed. The slugs that Jeffrey fired into Dennis were “hollow point” rounds designed to collapse and look like a “mushroom” on impact. Both had hit bones, which caused them to ricochet inside the body. During the autopsy, the bullets were recovered inside the corpse, according to Cuyahoga County Coroner Elizabeth K. Balraj and Lake County Coroner William C. Downing. There were no exit wounds. There were no bullet holes in Dennis Avery’s chest. The only bullet holes were in his back. LaTourette hadn’t lied. The proof was indisputable—to everyone but Jeffrey.
“They are lying. They will do anything to discredit me. I shot Dennis Avery in the chest.”
Judge Parks had asked Jeffrey that morning during the sentencing hearing if he had anything that he wanted to say before the judge passed judgment. Jeffrey hadn’t said anything. “But I thought about saying, ‘Thank you, Judge, thank you, jury, and fuck you, Steve LaTourette.”’
Besides LaTourette, Jeffrey was irritated at Dr. Schmidtgoessling and her testimony that compared him to Dennis Avery. “I don’t have any of the same characteristics as Dennis Avery. I would kill myself if I believed I did. . . . She said I have a profound hatred for women. That’s stupid. I know more about womankind than most of the rest of the world because of what God has shown me. I have profound respect for women. . . .”