2006: Jeffrey Lundgren, cult killer

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U.S. cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren answered on this date in 2006 for the murders of his disobedient followers.

Lundgren cleaved off a small sect of devotees cultivated while working as a tour guide at Kirtland Temple, a historically important church of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.*

Though they numbered fewer than 20, Lundgren’s followers bought into his prophetic-revelation act well enough to fork over thousands of dollars to him. Lundgren reciprocated by keeping them under his sway, eventually moving most of them into his own house the better to control them.

Except the family of Dennis Avery.

Avery, his wife Cheryl, and daughters aged 15, 13, and 6 attracted Lundgren’s ire for their reticence about the move-in, although to judge by their liberal contributions the family’s confidence in Lundgren was in no way shaken. Eventually the prophet out of whatever combination of pique, power-tripping, and religious fervor decided to “prune the vineyard” — his phrase — by having the whole quintet slaughtered by his live-in apostles at a camping retreat in April 1989.

This murder kept under wraps long enough for Lundgren to move his little cult to West Virginia, and a few months later to ditch his fellow cultists and move himself to California, before an informant tipped John Law to the shallow grave in early 1990. Besides the prophetic mastermind, Lundgren’s wife Alice and several of his followers caught long prison sentences in payment of the butcher’s bill.

* Rebranded (since 2001) as the “Community of Christ”, this is the more moderate or Protestant mainline-adjacent cousin of the better-known Latter-Day Saints movement, a.k.a. Mormonism — recognizing leadership succession through Joseph Smith‘s son Joseph Smith III instead of through the militant desert pioneer Brigham Young.

On this day..

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