Ervil LeBaron’s LDS Trail Of Death
By Ezekiel Gacee
Additional Reporting by Graeme Burglar
That he turned out to be a cult leader was something like destiny for Ervil LeBaron. He was born into a family run polygamous sect of Mormonism that his father was a powerful elder in and was surrounded by criminals who claimed they could speak to the heavens growing up. Born into a cult and raised under the strict dogma his father preached, there were few practical options for Ervil, already a cursed casualty of a mostly bygone LDS before he could speak for himself.
Ervil’s old man was Alma Dayer LeBaron who considered himself a spiritual prophet and was guided by “mystical visions” of the future. Alma had a one of these visions in the 1920’s that foresaw a move to Mexico and would rewrite the history of the LeBaron’s. This prophecy from the heavens spurred Alma to bring his whole church south of the border including his two wives, Ervil, and his ten brothers and sisters. God may have spoken to Alma about establishing a church in southern Mexico; it’s impossible to verify of course, but there was likely another reason for the pilgrimage that was more secular in nature. More than 30 years prior in the 1890’s the Mormon church had banned their long-standing practice of plural marriage while under considerable legal threat from the US government. The United States had become an unkind environment for polygamists, but in Mexico the rules were relaxed.
The move led to Ervil growing up isolated from greater society in a foreign land with a language barrier. Inside his home it was all antiquated Latter Day Saints preaching, all the time. Sometimes the family and members of the church would crisscross the boarder to the American southwest where they still had ties, but there were few relationships to forge outside the established brood of expatriate Mormons he was surrounded by.
As an adult and into midlife Ervil LeBaron would claim to have the kind of visions that made a guru out of his father. To no one’s surprise the grown up Ervil was fanatical to an extreme. He outpaced the rest of his family in taking wives and before long he was raising many children in the only manner he knew. The man began seeing himself as a prophet of the LDS, and he wasn’t the only one in his flock that felt they were being summoned by God to share scripture.
Ervil’s brother Joel aspired to bring the word of the lord to a new generation, and it was Joel who started his own church when Alma died. Within that church, brother Ervil had a position of power, and he wielded his position as an elder to influence the growing LDS community in the Mexican church. There were issues as the faction got bigger. Ervil was more radical than Joel, had more particular translations of scripture, and the brothers began to quarrel over how the operation should be run. This issue became bigger than a simple difference of opinion between siblings and it stretched further as time was on. To cut out the nuances of the family drama, the issue was this- Ervil LeBaron was a megalomaniac who wanted every inch of control he could grip onto.
Disagreements between the brothers morphed into an ugly feud at the dawn of the ‘70’s. In the end, when Ervil didn’t get his way, he disavowed his brother and started his own operation called The Church of the Lamb of God where he could assume leadership and control the doctrine. Establishing the Lamb of God turned out to be a disaster, to put it mildly. The newly minted preacher would take a dangerous piece of old LDS theology with him on his mission that would have deadly consequences for the people who got in his way.
It was 1972 when Ervil started The Church of The Lamb of God. The preacher quickly accrued devoted followers and by then he had a brood of adult children from his ten wives who saw their father as something of a living deity they’d do anything for. It was a new high-water mark for the life of Ervil LeBaron, but the budding Latter Day Saint couldn’t keep his fingers off the cult leader playbook or let go of his resentments.
There’s a dangerous idea in Mormon lore from the 19th century called ‘blood atonement’ that none other than Brigham Young came up with. The short version of the concept is that there are sinners who’ve done wrong by the lord so badly that the only way for them to get to heaven is with the sacrifice of life. Ervil was very fond of out-of-date Mormon theology, so it’s no surprise he took this loophole seriously.
For Ervil, having his own church wasn’t enough to settle the score with Joel. In August of ’72, only a short time after The Lamb of God was established, two of Ervil’s followers found his brother, beat him, and shot him to death. Blood atonement had a 20th century victim, and the authorities had a good idea where the blame should fall.
It didn’t take long for the police in Mexico to figure out Ervil and his brother were locked in a feud at the time of Joel’s assassination. After a brief investigation Ervil was booked for murder and when he went before a jury he was convicted. That might have been the end of the madness the preacher brought to his dominion, but an appeals court reversed the decision and Ervil was free to go back to his ardent followers. The Mexican justice system had a monster prepared to serve the rest of his life in prison in its grasp, but a technicality let the deadly prophet off the hook. This decision would be of great consequence for the unlucky souls Ervil LeBaron had issues with for the remainder of his lifetime and beyond. The Mormon Manson, as he'd later be called, was now emboldened and knew exactly the kind of power he yielded. God spoke to Ervil, and God wanted atonement.
The short stint in prison did less than nothing to impede Ervil. If anything, it gave him time to cook up a long list of people he wanted to send heavenward. The cult he’d created had around 100 members who were willing to do anything their leader imagined and follow the words of their living saint they did. Blood atonement became a regular part of Ervil’s sermons, and his flock believed the words came from God. The killing of Joel LeBaron had only been the start of a long trail of murders carried out in Mexico and the American southwest by Lamb of God members and Ervil’s kin. Dozens of executions were carried out, including the murder of an eight-year-old girl whose father had made the cult leader’s shit list. Ervil also ordered the killings of more disapproving members of his family. The man wanted revenge for the slightest of infractions and salvation through death was the penalty in every case.
The single bloodiest day of LeBaron’s reign of terror happened on June 27th, 1988, in an event that came to be known as the 4 O’clock Murders. On that day three killings were carried out simultaneously at 4pm on strict orders. What makes the event remarkable isn’t just the number of victims to fall, but that the crimes were perpetrated hundreds of miles apart from each other. The precisely coordinated killings came from a commandment from God Ervil told his followers, of course.
There had been another execution in the US a year later that received headlines, and that case might have spelled the end of things for the LeBaron-led rampage, if not for another prophecy.
One of Ervil LeBaron’s rivals was fellow polygamous leader Dr. Rulon Allred, who some believe was a cult leader in his own right. In 1977 members of Ervil’s church crossed the border and headed to Utah to find the Mormon doctor and he wound up murdered in Salt Lake City shortly after their arrival. By then several Lamb of God members had been arrested for their crimes and law enforcement offices in Mexico and the United States were communicating with each other about the escalating number of Mormon’s who’d been killed or had disappeared between the jurisdictions. Putting the pieces together would take time and there would be more casualties after Allred’s murder, but once the investigations matured all roads led back to a LDS preacher in Mexico with ten wives and 50 children.
Ervil was captured by Mexican police on June 1st, 1979. Shortly after the arrest LeBaron was handed over to the FBI for extradition to Utah where Rulon Allred had been murdered. Authorities couldn’t pin all the crimes that had occurred in the US on Ervil, but in the Allred case a few members of Lamb of God including one of LeBaron’s own sons agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
While awaiting trial Ervil began writing down his prophecies for what would become something like an addendum to The Book of Mormon. It would be called ‘The New Covenants’ and it would end up finding its way into the hands of the cult leader’s followers. Before that would happen, Ervil LeBaron would meet his jury. Trial commenced in May of 1980 and Ervil wasn’t so lucky with the law on his second trip through the justice system. LeBaron was found guilty of orchestrating the homicide of Rulon Allred and sentenced to life in prison. There would be no appeal. Newspapers called Ervil “The Mormon Manson.”
With Ervil behind bars law enforcement focused on finding the cult members who were responsible for carrying out the many hits. A few arrests followed, including that of Ervil’s 10th wife Vonda White, who was convicted on murder charges in Mexico. The law had caught up with The Lamb of God and numbers in the church dwindled down to all but the most devoted of followers. In prison, Ervil continued to work on his manuscript, but his prophesizing didn’t last very long. Ervil LeBaron died of a heart attack on Aug. 16th, 1981, just over a year after his conviction. The cycle of violence he set in motion, however, didn’t die with Ervil. Scores would be settled from beyond the grave.
The twist in this story comes when ‘The New Covenants’ made it’s way back to Ervil’s family where a wife paid some $3,000 to have the messy text restored. Once there was a version of the tome that could be shared, Ervil’s writing made its way into the hands of his remaining devotees. With his intended audience reached, Ervil’s plague of death would roll on to a new chapter.
To say Ervil was a petty man would be a hell of an understatement. The guy couldn’t let a slight go without an execution. In prison Ervil had time to consider his latest enemies, and he put their names to paper. ‘The New Covenants’ was not just ramblings about faith to be studied in the leader’s absence, it was also something of a hit list. When the text was deciphered the brainwashed members of Lamb of God found the names Ervil wanted taken care of, and the bodies started piling up again.
The first casualty was Ervil’s own son Isaac in June 1983. Isaac had testified against Ervil at trial, so it raised some eyebrows when he died of a highly suspicious suicide in Texas. Later that year, Ervil’s eldest son Arturo who was killed in a hail of bullets in Mexico. In May of ‘84, Ervil’s wife Yolanda Rios was strangled to death and buried in Dallas. Not long after that the late cult leader’s loyal son Heber Lebaron shot and killed a man named Gamaliel Rios who was referenced in ‘The New Covenants.’ Leo Evoniuk was another one of Ervil’s targets. All investigators found of him were dentures and a puddle of blood.
When the dust finally settled the number of people whose lives ended after crossing Ervil LeBaron was tallied at 25. If you were to include suspicious suicides and people who vanished mysteriously in Mexico the number of victims is closer to 30, and may be even higher. Some of these cases were solved and arrests were made. Other cases remain open.
There’s still a small contingent of true believers out there who believe Ervil was a living saint, though it’s hard to know how many are out there. The last turn in this story is that six of Ervil’s sons escaped foster care out west in what was believed to be a coordinated effort. The boys were never seen or heard from again. The common belief is that these LeBaron’s made their way down to Mexico to join back up with the cult. The hope is that the cycle is broken, and we’ve seen the last of blood atonement, but with another generation of true believers on the loose there’s reason for concern.
Ervil LeBaron was an evil man who used religion to justify a massive killing spree, but he wasn’t born evil. If you observe the lives of wide scale killers like Ervil a pattern emerges from youth. Psychopaths are born out of trauma and often come from homes where there’s abuse by the people who raise them. In Ervil’s case it seems the abuse was spiritual in nature. His father isolated him in a prison of old LDS fantasy and placed him in a universe where any healthy worldviews would be out of reach; all for the sake of preserving a lifestyle that was against the rules of civil society. It may seem like a digression but it’s true that most child molesters were molested as children, and there’s something to a cult leader being raised by a cult leader that fits a pattern too. Alma LeBaron should shoulder some of the blame for how Ervil turned out. In a case like this there’s blame to be cast in other directions as well.
The history of Mormonism has some unsavory bits of dogma in it that have produced many cults and led to horror stories like The Church of the Lamb of God. Polygamy is a cult creator in some ways, but blood atonement is the most problematic teaching of the lot for obvious reasons. Another set of LDS murders that included an infant among its victims was chronicled in John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven and you can probably guess what was used to justify those killings. Maybe Ervil was such a psychopath he would’ve found a way to kill without blood atonement. However, being able to convince his followers to carry out all these executions with a justification from scripture is at the root of the tremendous scale of his crimes. And this came from one man. Brigham Young is still seen as something a prophet in the LDS despite the death toll his spiritual theory has caused. Some of the responsibility here must belong to Young despite his death long before Ervil LeBaron’s arrival on earth. Mormonism isn’t the only religion with this kind of caveat that creates havoc on earth either. The world would be a different place if you removed jehad from Islam, for example. Toxic doctrine is a serious problem and Ervil Lebaron’s story is a good example of just how bad the results of it can get.
Ervil was the catalyst for at least 30 deaths, and he didn’t get started until he was past middle age. On its face, what he did makes for a fascinating true crime drama, but there’s more to the story when it’s cracked open and the question of why he committed all his crimes comes into focus. The way he was raised played a significant role. Having a cult leader playing the role of his father didn’t help any either. And being isolated in the loop of toxic dogma may be the biggest factor. It can’t be underestimated what bad faith can do to someone. For the living children of Ervil LeBaron and for the sake of humanity as a whole, may the cycle cease before more blood is spilled to please the lord.
