Ervil LeBaron: How a fundamentalist leader became known as the ‘Mormon Manson’ — The Independent

A new book investigates the 2019 killings of nine people with ties to the extended LeBaron family, Clémence Michallon reports, and delves into the LeBarons’ complicated history | Monday 25 July 2022 22:22

On 27 June 1988, four murders took place across three different locations. All occurred in Texas at the same time: 4pm. The date, journalist Sally Denton would later note in her book The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land, marked 144 years since the killing of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The four victims, the youngest of whom was an eight-year-old girl, were all former members of the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times [sic], a Mormon fundamentalist sect founded by a man called Joel LeBaron. Their deaths had been ordered by Ervil LeBaron, Joel’s brother and the leader of a rival sect, the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God.

While the four murders were committed in Ervil LeBaron’s name, and under his orders, Ervil had been dead for seven years at the time of the killings. Prior to his death in 1981, the fundamentalist leader had written a manifesto including a list of people to be killed. They were considered infidels, and Ervil had convinced his followers that murdering them was the right thing to do. His influence was such that people kept killing in his name, risking a lifetime in prison, even long after he had passed on.

The murders – which became known as the four o’clock murders in the true-crime space – are part of multiple killings attributed to the LeBaron family over the past 50 years. According to Denton, six LeBaron siblings were indicted in 1992; five were sentenced to time in prison and another was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony. In 1992, the LA Times estimated that “the LeBaron family’s saga spans two decades and involves 25 to 30 murders”, noting that Ervil’s sect “also attracted a handful of non-family followers.” A Daily Beast article published in July this year attributed “as many as 50 members” to “members of LeBaron’s family”, “as well as bank robbery, car theft, drug dealing, and selling guns to drug traffickers.”

Denton’s new book, published on 28 June by Liveright, an imprint of W W Norton & Company, investigates the 2019 killings of nine people (three women and six children) from Mormon enclaves in Mexico with ties to the extended LeBaron family. A contemporary column in The Salt Lake Tribune pointed out they were not members of Ervil’s sect, noting: “While many of the families in the colonies share the surname LeBaron, they are likely of no association to Ervil’s group, most of whom they’ve never met or interacted with.” The killings brought international attention to the family and the apparent tensions between the LeBarons and Mexico’s drug cartels, who were suspected of being behind the attack.

The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land also serves as a deep chronicle of the LeBaron family’s history, and its place in Mormon doctrine. Released around the same time as two documentaries (Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey on Netflix and Under the Banner of Heaven, the TV series adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name), Mormon fundamentalism is currently at the front of the modern true-crime landscape.

The Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God

While Ervil LeBaron, having earned the nickname “Mormon Manson” due to the killings perpetrated at his behest, is the most infamous member of his family, the LeBarons’ ties to fundamental Mormonism far predated his adulthood.

In 1924, his father Alma Dayer LeBaron Sr (who went by Dayer) was excommunicated from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for practicing polygamy, which the church renounced in 1890. (Prior to that, polygamy had been a Mormon practice beginning in the 1840s, under Joseph Smith’s leadership.) Ervil LeBaron, the ninth child of Dayer and his wife Maud (one of Dayer’s two wives), was born in 1925. The family settled for a time in Colonia Juárez, a small town in Chihuahua, but, per Denton, were ostracized due to their subscription to polygamy and asked to leave. In 1944, Dayer began establishing Colonia LeBaron, a polygamist community in Galeana, Chihuahua. Dayer died in 1951; four years later, in 1955, his son Joel started the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times.

Denton says Ervil was initially his brother’s “most passionate devotee”, but their rapport soured. In the late Sixties, Ervil started his own sect, the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God, and in 1972, Ervil had his brother Joel murdered. The killing marked the beginning of a “ruthless campaign” by Ervil, writes Denton, which would see him order “Mafia-style hits on his many rival polygamist leaders and apostates from his church”.

Blood atonement

As sect leader, Ervil – described by The Daily Beast as “a 6’8” white supremacist and religious fundamentalist who loved to seduce underage girls” – relied on the idea of blood atonement, a disputed concept within Mormon doctrine according to which people who commit certain acts can be redeemed only through the shedding of their blood. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has rejected the doctrine, as seen here in a statement released in 2010.)

In 1981, The Associated Press noted that Ervil’s “belief that he was ‘the one mighty and strong prophet of God’ and his vow made in 1970 that ‘blood will run to solve our problems’ has led to a reign of terror among Mormon fundamentalists.” At the time, “the number of LeBaron’s former disciples who have died or disappeared over the past two decades” had reached 18. In her book, Denton attributes 33 murders to the killing spree that began with Joel’s death.

From Chihuahua to NXIVM

To talk about Ervil LeBaron is to talk about women and girls – his 13 wives, his daughters, and the 11 girls, “aged 13 to 17”, writes Denton, who traveled from Chihuahua to the US to join NXIVM, Keith Raniere’s cult in upstate New York. Former prosecutor Moira Kim Penza, who led the case against Raniere, told the Times Union in 2019 she believed some of the girls were “exposed to Raniere’s pedophilic and misogynistic teachings” and “groomed to have sex with Raniere”.

“I believe the girls from the LeBaron community were targeted specifically because, having been raised in a polygamist sect, they were more vulnerable to Raniere’s teachings on sexuality, including that it is natural for women to be monogamous and for men to have more than one partner – a philosophy that served Raniere’s own sexual preferences,” Penza told the publication.

Raniere’s cameo in the LeBaron story is at once surprising and predictable: Raniere’s narrative, similar to LeBaron’s, is the tale of a man who used spiritual doctrine in the service of his own desires and interests. (Raniere was sentenced in October 2020 to 120 years in prison after being convicted of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, attempted sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy, forced labor conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy.)

“Nowhere on our continent does a faith based on male supremacy loom larger than in the polygamist sects dotting the American West and northern Mexico, which follow the original teachings of the libidinous founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith,” wrote author Julia Scheeres in a review of Denton’s book forThe New York Times. To Scheeres (whose own books include the memoir Jesus Landabout her upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian household and A Thousand Lives about Jonestown), “Denton’s book” – and Ervil LeBaron’s story – “is a testament to what happens when male power, under the guise of religious conviction, goes unchecked.”

Ervil LeBaron’s legacy

Ervil LeBaron was arrested, extradited to the US, and convicted in 1980 of having ordered the 1977 murder of Rulon Allred, the leader of another polygamist sect. He was also convicted of plotting to kill his brother Verlan LeBaron, also the head of a different polygamist group, The New York Times reported at the time. Ervil was sentenced to life in prison and was found dead in his cell the following year, in 1981, having apparently died by suicide. Prior to his death, he wrote a long manifesto including a hit list of enemies for his followers to kill.

Denton notes that those killings continued into the Nineties and included the four o’clock murders for which six LeBaron siblings were indicted.

“The families who remained in the Mexican colonies had to contend with threats from Ervil’s followers until the list allegedly went ‘dead’ around 2013,” Mormon consultant, blogger, and podcaster Lindsay Hansen Park wrote in her 2019 Salt Lake Tribune column. Nowadays, she added, “many of the citizens of the Mormon colonies are members of a variety of different Mormon churches – from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to independently practicing Mormon polygamists. Some practice plural marriage and others believe in the principle but don’t practice it, though they all trace their presence in Mexico to it.”

Tensions with drug cartels

The LeBaron name “became common in La Mora” through “intermarriage over the generations”, The Associated Press reported in 2019 citing Cristina Rosetti, a scholar and expert of Mormon fundamentalism. “But since the family name is so widely associated with the church, La Mora residents consider themselves ‘independent Mormons’ to stress they have no connection to the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times,” the agency noted.

Tensions grew between those communities and the drug cartels in the same area. In 2009, “Mormon families of the same LeBaron name were targeted by drug cartels”, Park wrote. That year, Eric LeBaron was kidnapped by a cartel that demanded a $1m ransom in exchange for his release. (Eric was eventually released; the family has said the ransom was not paid.)

Also in 2009, Benjamin LeBaron, an anti-crime activist, was killed along with his brother-in-law Luis Widmar. The 2019 killings of nine people – Titus Miller, Tiana Miller, Rogan Langford, Krystal Miller, Trevor Langford, Howard Miller, Christina Marie Langford Johnson, Rhonita Miller, and Dawna Langford – were described by relatives as a continuation of the same strand of violence. Earlier this month, a US judge ordered the Juarez cartel to pay $1.5bn to the families as part of a lawsuit.

Amazon’s Top Books for Summer 2022 — Saturday Evening Post

Every month, Amazon staffers sift through hundreds of new books searching for gems. Here’s what Amazon senior editor Al Woodworth chose especially for Post readers this summer.

Amazon.com Editors

The Colony by Sally Denton

Ripped from the headlines, this book follows a fundamentalist Mormon community in Mexico and tells a gripping story of murder, drug cartels, and family secrets.

New York Times Book Review Podcast

The investigative journalist and author Sally Denton visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land,” which takes readers across the border to a Mormon sect in Mexico.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | How to Listen

‘The Colony’ revisits 2019 La Mora massacre — and dives into Mormon history, Mexican politics, drug cartels

New book explores a place that began as a polygamous outpost.

By Nate Carlisle | THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE | FOX 13 Utah | June 25, 2022, 8:00 a.m.

It’s not often you can read about Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in the same book.

But that’s the vast, sandy ground covered in “The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land,” a volume due out Tuesday about the 2019 massacre near La Mora, Mexico. Longtime Mormon history and crime author Sally Denton merges the topics to create nonfiction that’s part historical, part political science and part war story.

The killers — whoever they were, exactly — used automatic weapons and, Denton reports, a rocket-propelled grenade to kill three women and six children. I traveled to La Mora to report on the funerals for The Salt Lake Tribune. While I heard some of the details that the surviving children told their parents, Denton told me a lot of things I didn’t know about the bullets that flew through the desert and the horror seen by the kids.

The victims had citizenship in Mexico and the United States. Denton explains all the history that left northern Mexico with a Dutch oven stew of Mormonism.

There’s the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which officially abandoned polygamy in 1890 as a condition of Utah statehood and kicks out members found practicing it. Then, add in the fundamentalist Mormons who still let men marry multiple women and other types of independent Mormons in between.

Denton conducted scores of interviews and cited other reporters’ work. Despite that, she can offer only theories for the bloody ambush.

The first is that the target was one of the mothers slain that day: Rhonita Miller.

“She was the only one that they burned alive,” Denton told me in an interview earlier this month, “that they used a rocket launcher [on]; that they videotaped it.”

Miller was also from the town of Colonia LeBaron, the destination the three families were traveling to that day and a community that had complex ties to all of Mexico’s factions. While La Mora had what one family member described as a “cordial relationship” with Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel, Colonia LeBaron had activists opposing the drug traffickers.

The LeBarons — as residents are known, even if their surnames aren’t LeBaron — also had poor relations with their neighbors over land and water. Denton describes how Colonia LeBaron wanted the government to do something about the corruption and violence. Advocates for native Mexicans accused the LeBarons of ignoring environmental laws to grow more Brussels sprouts, tomatillos and watermelons.

If your knowledge of Mexico comes from sipping margaritas in Cancun, you may have forgotten the country is fundamentally different from the United States. Drug cartels operate as nations within Mexican borders. Politics in Mexico City on down to municipal governments are intertwined with opposition to — and cooperation with — the traffickers.

Denton spells out all the ways Colonia LeBaron’s conflicts could have birthed the massacre. She even floats the idea that someone in Colonia LeBaron could have worked with the cartels to perpetrate the massacre to settle old Mormon grievances.

“When it came down to it,” Denton told me, “the LeBarons don’t have a lot of friends down there.”

When I called David Langford this month to ask why he thought one of his wives, Dawna, and two of his sons, 11-year-old Trevor and 2-year-old Rogan, were gunned down, he didn’t believe anyone in Colonia LeBaron could have cooperated with the cartels.

“There’s no shred of evidence,” he said, “to support a theory like that.”

His theory is that it had to do with a lithium mine scheduled to begin production in 2024 about 75 miles south of La Mora.

Langford’s idea is a little hard to track, but the short version is that someone in the Mexican government perpetrated the killings to boost support for a better road leading to the mine. Denton doesn’t address that possibility in “The Colony.”

Langford said his surviving children are doing well. They now live near Colorado City, Ariz. He says about 15 to 20 other families moved out of La Mora, too.

At least 30 people have been arrested in connection with the assault, Langford and Denton both told me. No one has yet been convicted of murder.

The Salt Lake Tribune and FOX 13 are content-sharing partners.

The ‘Mormon Manson’ and His Family’s Mexican Massacre

Ervil LeBaron was a murderous white supremacist and religious fundamentalist, nine of whose followers were slaughtered in a 2019 cartel killing.

Lewis Beale

Published Jul. 03, 2022 8:08PM ET | The Daily Beast

He’s been called the “Mormon Manson,” but polygamist Ervil LeBaron and his Mexican-based family managed to make Charlie and his gang look almost tame by comparison. A 6’8” white supremacist and religious fundamentalist who loved to seduce underage girls, LeBaron trained women to kill for him and ordered hits on rival polygamists and “apostates” from his church. And kill they did: Members of LeBaron’s family were responsible for as many as 50 murders, as well as bank robbery, car theft, drug dealing, and selling guns to drug traffickers.

Ervil was eventually arrested for his crimes and extradited to the U.S., where he died in prison in 1981. But his wives, children, and spiritual followers continued their murderous rampage well into the ’90s. As one LeBaron family member put it, “Everyone is an infidel if they don’t believe what you believe.”

Outwardly, however, the LeBarons appeared to be just a wealthy farming clan with bizarre sexual practices who had made an “I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me” pact with El Chapo and the notorious Sinaloa cartel, which had drug smuggling routes near the Mormon colony. But, says Sally Denton, author of The Colony: Faith and Blood In A Promised Land, “I think it’s naive for the public to believe they were just friendly neighbors, saying hello at sicario checkpoints. I don’t believe you don’t live with some of the most violent people in the world without having accommodations. I think they were helping with guns.”

All this fell apart when El Chapo was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to life in prison, after which rival groups began fighting over the Sinaloa drug empire, which put Mormon lives in danger. And on November 12, 2019, the worst that could happen did happen: on a 12-mile stretch of barren road, a favored drug cartel route that happened to link two Mormon enclaves, as many as 100 sicarios descended on a convoy of three cars containing Mormon mothers and their children and murdered nine people, some of whom were burned alive.

Some said the victims were deliberately targeted, to start a war between the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels; others said it was a case of mistaken identity; and still others said it was an offshoot of a fight for water rights between the Mormons and their Mexican neighbors. Denton begs to differ.

“I think somebody owed somebody something,” she says. “I think there was a great big message, not to the women and children, but to their husbands and fathers. It was not a case of mistaken identity; they were targeted. It was about money; somebody reneged on some kind of deal.”

But The Colony is about a lot more than a perverse, corrupt, and violent Mormon family and its relationship with drug cartels. It is, in fact, a mesmerizing deep dive into Mormon fanaticism, violence, deceit, mental illness, and misogyny, dating back to the religion’s mid-19th century founding by Joseph Smith. It follows Smith’s acolytes after his 1844 murder by a mob in Carthage, Ill. to their eventual landing place in Utah. There Brigham Young began what he called a “Mormon reformation,” which involved “cleansing the wayward Saints through blood atonement,” and ended up in the most infamous episode in Mormon history, the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a wagon train of 140 men, women, and children passing through Mormon territory were murdered, the slaughter blamed on Paiute Indians. It’s a stain the Church has never been able to wipe out.

“The Church has never accurately acknowledged its role in the massacre,” says Denton. “A lot of people were involved, and the evidence shows it went up to Brigham Young. They blame it on the Paiutes, or on renegades in Southern Utah. It has to have discredited the Church.”

The massacre and Brigham Young’s role in it shine a light on what looks like mental illness in not just Smith and Young but in the LeBaron family. “There are references to a strain of insanity in the LeBaron family, and in the leaders of the Mormon Church historically,” says Denton. “I think it’s the fact the entire Church is based on this communion with God that any man can do, and sets it up with any delusional aspects. You have to look at the visions of Smith and Young, down to the LeBarons, and question what’s the impulse here. I think with the LeBarons, a lot can be explained by incest.”

And then there’s polygamy. The practice was part of the Church since its inception, but when the Mormon leadership realized Utah would never become a state because of its existence, polygamy was outlawed in 1890. That forced recalcitrant fundamentalists south to Mexico, where then-President Porfirio Diaz encouraged them to settle in the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua, which soon became a hotbed of religious fanaticism (Mexico now has the largest Mormon population outside the U.S., the vast majority not polygamists). During the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa forced them to move back to the States, and most never returned. But the LeBarons did, and established Colonia LeBaron in 1944. It soon became a center of sexual deviancy, something that also has been a part of Mormon history since its beginnings.

“When Joseph Smith first introduced [polygamy] it was not without some sexual deviancy,” says Denton, who is herself a descendant of Mormon pioneers and polygamists. “I interviewed wives and daughters who were raised in polygamy, and one of them said they were converted below the belt. It promotes sexual deviancy, a lot of suppression and repression, even in people who don’t have that proclivity. The true believers believe they are creating the kingdom of God on Earth, and the goal is to spread the seed of man, and for the women, it’s to have as many children as possible, and in the LeBaron colony, they began having babies as early as 13 years old.”

Denton’s book is being released at just the right time. Interest in Mormon crime and perversion seems to be hitting some sort of all-time high, thanks to two recent documentaries, a true crime series, and a podcast: Murder Among the Mormons, a Netflix series about a man who forged documents related to the Latter-day Saint movement; Under the Banner of Heaven, an FX on Hulu series about the investigation of the murders of a Mormon mother and daughter, that involves a fundamentalist branch of the church; Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, a Netflix documentary about fundamentalist pedophile leader Warren Jeffs; and Deliver Us From Ervil, an Apple podcast about the LeBaron family.

“I believe all stories that are deep and legitimate find their level,” says Denton of this Mormon wave. “There are parallels between the LeBaron family and the Mormons in Mexico that are relevant to the impulses of white nationalism and events going on in the U.S. A lot of the same impulses of clannishness, nativism, and white Christian nationalism are the underbelly of all three of these stories.”

But it is the LeBaron massacre victims who are at the heart of The Colony, and the polygamist wives who have to deal with the misogyny of their husbands. Only a handful of people have been arrested for the murders, and to this day, no one really knows who ordered the hit, or why. Denton sees this as a case of how women are expendable in the LeBaron community, that these young mothers and their children should never have been allowed to drive along this dangerous road without their husbands, unarmed.

“In the end I came back to the real victims of this story, the women and children—the ones who always seem to be expendable in these stories,” she says. “I sought to dig deeper into their murders and their relationship to a long and often sordid history of polygamy. I hoped to show not only the forces at work behind the scenes—some of them quite dark—but also to use my own family’s history with the early [Latter-Day Saints] faith to put it all in context.”

‘It wasn’t mistaken identity – it was about money’ — The Daily Mail

Author claims nine murdered Mormon moms and kids were slaughtered by the cartel in targeted REVENGE massacre after their ‘fathers and husbands reneged on a guns deal’

By JENNIFER SMITH, CHIEF REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 12:17 EDT, 4 July 2022 | UPDATED: 15:01 EDT, 4 July 2022

An author has shared her theory that the nine Mormon mothers and their children who were slaughtered in 2019 were killed in a revenge attack by the cartel that was designed to send a message to their husbands and fathers after a deal went wrong.

Nine members of the LeBaron and Miller families were shot and burned in La Mora, a town 70 miles south of the US-Mexico border, in November 2019.

Members of the cartel have been arrested for the killings but the motive has always been murky; some have suggested the killings were a case of mistaken identity, while others say the families were caught in the crossfires of a turf war between rival gangs.

Now, author Sally Denton has shared her theory that the families were in fact in business with the cartel – and that their business relationship took a deadly turn.

‘I think it’s naive for the public to believe they were just friendly neighbors, saying hello at sicario checkpoints.

‘I don’t believe you don’t live with some of the most violent people in the world without having accommodations. I think they were helping with guns.

‘I think somebody owed somebody something. I think there was a great big message, not to the women and children, but to their husbands and fathers.

‘It was not a case of mistaken identity; they were targeted. It was about money; somebody reneged on some kind of deal,’ she told The Daily Beast.