Under the Banner of Heaven (36 page)

* Rulon Allred’s polygamist father, Byron C. Allred, was an eminent Mormon who had been Speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives before, in flight from the cohab hunters, relocating to Mexico, where Rulon was born in 1906. Alex Joseph and John Bryant—leaders of independent polygamist communities whom Dan and Ron Lafferty visited in the summer of 1984, shortly before they murdered Brenda and Erica Lafferty—were introduced to Mormon Fundamentalism by Rulon Allred. Both Joseph and Bryant, in fact, were devoted followers of Allred before breaking with him and going out on their own.

After the split, the Short Creekers had little further involvement with their counterparts in the Allred group. Taking care to fly below the radar of the Gentile culture, Uncle Roy and his followers were seldom noticed by the world beyond Short Creek. The Apostolic United Brethren wasn’t so fortunate. On the afternoon of May 10,1977, Rulon Allred was treating patients in his office in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City, when two young women walked in, shot him dead, and calmly walked out.

Allred’s killers turned out to be members of another breakaway fundamentalist sect known as the LeBaron clan. Founded by a man named Dayer LeBaron, who hailed from one of the Mormon colonies in Mexico, the sect had once maintained a loose association with Allred’s group. After Rulon Allred was convicted of polygamy in Utah in 1947 and jumped parole, the LeBarons even gave him refuge in Mexico for a period.

Dayer LeBaron had seven sons. Three of the seven LeBaron brothers would eventually claim, at one time or another, to be the “one mighty and strong”; each regarded himself as a divinely ordained prophet comparable to Moses who would return the Mormon Church to the righteous path it had abandoned after the 1890 Manifesto.

The oldest of the brothers, Benjamin, was fond of roaring at the top of his lungs in public to prove that he was “the Lion of Israel.” In one legendary incident that occurred in the early 1950s, he lay facedown in the middle of a busy Salt Lake City intersection, bringing traffic to a halt, and did two hundred push-ups. When the police finally persuaded him to get up off the pavement he proudly insisted, “Nobody else can do that many. That proves I’m the One Mighty and Strong.” Not long thereafter, Ben was committed to the Utah State Mental Hospital.

In the 1960s, with Ben locked up in a psychiatric institution, two of the other LeBaron brothers emerged as the group’s guiding lights: soft-spoken, amiable Joel and tightly wound Ervil, who weighed 240 pounds, stood six feet four inches tall, and knew how to nurse a grudge. A dashing figure, he was found irresistibly attractive by many otherwise sensible women. Another LeBaron sibling, Alma, reported that Ervil “used to dream about having twenty-five or thirty wives so he could multiply and replenish the earth… He wanted to be like Brigham Young, a great man.”

Ervil also fancied himself a brilliant writer and scriptorian. According to Rena Chynoweth—who would become his thirteenth wife in 1975 and, two years later, pull the trigger of the gun that killed Rulon Allred*—Ervil would write scripture obsessively, in marathon sessions that might last for a week or more. “He would go for days without shaving or bathing, putting in twenty hours a day,” she recalled, sustaining himself “on continuous cups of coffee. When he sweated, that was all you could smell coming out of his pores—coffee.”

* Chynoweth went to great lengths to conceal her involvement in Alfred’s murder. Although she was charged with the crime in 1978, she lied under oath at trial and thereby beat the rap. Twelve years later she wrote a breezy, tell-all memoir about the LeBarons titled
The Blood Covenant
(the source of these quotes), in which she revealed her culpability. When the book was published in 1990, Allred’s survivors filed a civil action against Chynoweth and won a $52 million wrongful-death judgment against her.

Both Ervil and Joel were imbued with exceptional charisma—and both claimed to be the “one mighty and strong.” It was therefore inevitable, perhaps, that the LeBaron brothers would eventually clash.

The terminal rupture began in November 1969, when Joel, the elder brother and nominal presiding prophet, booted Ervil out of the sect for insubordination. Soon thereafter Ervil had a revelation in which God explained that Joel—by all accounts an uncommonly benevolent man, routinely described by his followers as “saintlike”—had become an obstacle to His work and needed to be removed. On August 20, 1972, in the polygamist settlement of Los Molinos, which Joel had established eight years earlier on the Baja Peninsula, he was shot in the throat and head, fatally, by a member of the group loyal to Ervil.*

* Los Molinos was also where, in 1986, thirteen-year-old Linda Kunz married thirty-seven-year-old Tom Green, the Utah polygamist convicted in 2001 after boasting of his polygamous lifestyle on
Dateline NBC.

After he ordered the death of Joel, Ervil initiated a divinely inspired series of murders, resulting in the killing of at least five additional people through 1975 and the wounding of more than fifteen others. In March 1976 he was arrested for these crimes and held in a Mexican jail, but Ervil’s followers on the outside continued to do his bidding. Operating out of a post office box in southern California, they distributed pamphlets denouncing taxes, welfare, gun control, and rival polygamists. When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, Ervil’s subordinates even issued a decree threatening the candidate with death for his liberal views.

Less than a year after he was incarcerated, Ervil was let out of jail. The official explanation was a “lack of evidence,” although everyone assumed that well-placed bribes had more to do with it. Within a few months of his release, he had a disobedient daughter killed, and shortly after that arranged the murder of Rulon Allred, whose followers Ervil coveted and hoped to convert to his own group, the Church of the Lamb of God.

Ervil managed to remain a free man until 1979, when he was finally arrested in Mexico. He was extradited to the United States, convicted, and sentenced to life behind bars in the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, in the same maximum-security facility where Dan Lafferty now resides. By 1981, as he began to understand that his prospects for ever getting out of the penitentiary were nil, Ervil became increasingly frantic and irrational. According to Rena Chynoweth, he “began having revelations of a miracle that would free him. He envisioned God’s wrath striking down the prison walls like the walls of ancient Jericho, because the pagan temporal authorities dared to incarcerate God’s Chosen Prophet and Revelator.”

In August 1981, Ervil LeBaron was discovered dead in his cell at the age of fifty-six, felled by an apparent heart attack. Before succumbing, however, he had written a rambling four-hundred-page screed, oozing venom from every line, titled
The Book of the New Covenants.
The text was primarily a list of all those individuals who, in Ervil’s view, had ever been disloyal to him and thus deserved to die. This catalog of hatred was accompanied by scathing, semicoherent descriptions of the precise nature of each betrayal. Essentially, the book was an overwrought hit list. Some twenty copies were published, most of which wound up in the possession of Ervil’s most devoted followers.

These fervent Lambs of God, as they called themselves, were largely drawn from among Ervil’s fifty-four children—progeny who remained fanatically devoted to their father long after his death. Led by a son named Aaron LeBaron who was just thirteen when Ervil died, this gang of boys, girls, and young adults—most of whom had been physically and/or sexually abused by older members of the sect and then abandoned—resolved to avenge Ervil’s death by systematically spilling the blood of the persons listed in
The Book of the New Covenants.
A prosecutor assigned to the case referred to this pack of parentless kids as the LeBaron clan’s “Lord of the Flies generation.”

Two men on the hit list were assassinated in 1987. Then, on June 27, 1988—the 144th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s martyrdom—three more people on the list, along with the eight-year-old daughter of one of them, were ambushed and gunned down. These latter four murders, which occurred within five minutes of one another at different sites in Texas three hundred miles apart, were carefully planned to occur at almost the exact hour that Joseph was fatally shot in the Carthage jail.

Afterward, the Lambs of God bragged that they were responsible for the deaths of seventeen people all told. Because each of their victims had been killed as an act of blood atonement, the Lambs explained, the exterminations were justified in the eyes of the Lord.

In 1993, two of Ervil’s sons and one of his daughters were sentenced to life in prison for their involvement in some of these crimes. Two years after that, Aaron LeBaron, the mastermind of the gang, was captured in Mexico, extradited to Utah, and in 1997 sentenced to forty-five years in prison. The whereabouts of several other LeBaron offspring, who played lesser roles in the murders, remain unknown.

The Mormon presence in Mexico, which remains strong even today, goes back to 1886, when a group of polygamous Saints purchased fifty thousand acres along the Rio Piedras Verdes, about 150 miles southwest of El Paso, Texas, to escape the cohab hunts then sweeping Utah. By the time the first of the LeBarons moved south of the border in 1902, thirty-five hundred Mormons were already residing in the vicinity of this settlement at the foot of the Sierra Madre Occidental, which was called Colonia Juarez.

In 1944, Dayer LeBaron—father to Joel and Ervil—received a revelation in which God commanded him to buy a piece of mesquite-covered desert about thirty-five miles outside of Colonia Juarez. He cleared the land, planted a crop of beans, and christened the place Colonia LeBaron. It was soon the base of operations for Dayer’s expanding fundamentalist sect.

A cute teenager named Lavina Stubbs moved to Colonia LeBaron in 1958 after spending the first fifteen years of her life in Short Creek. The Stubbs family name was (and still is) one of the most prestigious pedigrees in Short Creek/Colorado City, but Lavina’s father had a falling out with Uncle Roy, converted to the LeBaron group, and moved his brood to Mexico. A year later, at the tender age of sixteen, having caught the eye of Prophet Joel LeBaron, Lavina became one of his plural wives.

“I was married to Joel for fourteen joyful years,” Lavina says. “He was an absolutely righteous man, one of the greatest men that ever lived.” Before moving away from Short Creek, Lavina’s mother had wanted her to marry DeLoy Bateman’s father, but the prophet commanded her to become the plural wife of someone else, whom she despised. “I was almost forced to marry a man there who I couldn’t stand,” she recalls. “I got out by the skin of my teeth. It was a miracle that my father took us away when he did, and God allowed me to marry Joel instead.”

In 1972, however, Joel was shot dead on Ervil’s orders, and Lavina’s life entered an extended rough stretch, from which it has yet to emerge. The worst of her heartache she attributes to Kenyon Blackmore—first cousin of Winston Blackmore, the erstwhile leader of the polygamist community in Bountiful, British Columbia. In 1983, Kenyon Black-more married Joel and Lavina LeBaron’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Gwendolyn. The marriage not only brought out the worst in both partners, but it has injected misery into the life of almost every person it has touched.

Among these unlucky souls is a Canadian woman named Annie Vandeveer Blackmore. When Kenyon Blackmore wed young Gwendolyn LeBaron, he was already married to Annie. At that point, in fact, Annie had been married to Kenyon for twenty-four years—yet he neglected to tell her that he had taken a second wife.

“See that picture on the wall?” Annie asks with a sour smile, pointing to a framed cover of the September 29, 1956, issue of Canada’s
Weekend Magazine
depicting a pair of beautiful seventeen-year-old cowgirls astride equally magnificent horses. “That was how I met Ken.” The two cowgirls are Annie and her twin sister, photographed on their family’s ranch outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. Upon seeing this magazine cover, twenty-year-old Kenyon Blackmore—an avid horseman from a family of renowned polygamists in western Canada—resolved on the spot to marry at least one of the lovely twins.

“When he come across this article,” Annie says, “he started to write us letters and became my pen pal. He was about to go on a mission to South Africa, but he wrote to me the whole time he was gone, and when he got home two years later he took a trip out to Winnipeg to see us. Six months later, in December 1959, Ken and me were married.” Exactly nine months after that, Annie gave birth to a baby girl, Lena, the first of seven children she would have with Kenyon, and they moved to Provo so he could attend Brigham Young University.

In 1966, Kenyon took a teaching job in Bountiful. And there, as Annie phrases it, “he started pushing for marrying plural wives. Before we’d gotten married he’d told me about his polygamist relatives, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. I’d only converted to Mormonism after meeting Ken. I didn’t know much about polygamy or anything. I was just a farmer’s daughter, a country girl from Manitoba.”

Annie tried to approach the idea with an open mind. “I was raised to be a peacemaker,” she says. “My whole life I tried to please him, to do whatever he wanted. But I just couldn’t accept plural marriage.” Annie’s refusal to consent to polygamy didn’t deter Kenyon, however. Openly and aggressively, he began to pursue a particularly alluring girl coveted by many men in Bountiful: Alaire, the adopted daughter of Kenyon’s uncle Ray Blackmore, who was the community’s presiding bishop. Kenyon’s amorous advances, which had not been sanctioned by either the bishop in Bountiful or the prophet in Colorado City, enraged Ray, who ordered his sons to chase Kenyon out of town—after which Alaire was married to Ray, her own father.*

* Four years after Ray Blackmore married his adopted daughter Alaire, he took Debbie Palmer (the woman who burned down her own house in Bountiful) as yet another plural wife.

For the next decade and a half Kenyon shuffled his growing family around western North America, scraping by as a ranch hand, a leather worker, and a carpenter, never settling in any one place for more than a year or two. Annie gradually began to understand, she says, that “the kids and I didn’t mean that much to him. Ken did whatever he wanted, with whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He’d go away for weeks at a time, wouldn’t ever call, wouldn’t tell me where he was.”