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Prophet of Death_The Mormon Blood Atonement Killings Page 2
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When Alice looked up at Jeffrey on that fall day in 1969, she realized that he didn’t remember anything about their first meeting a few months earlier.
“We met last spring,” she said. “You weren’t wearing any socks.”
Jeffrey glanced down. He wasn’t wearing any now either. They laughed. Keith invited Alice to play cards. He and Jeffrey let her win every hand. Afterward, they asked Alice if she wanted to go with them to a nearby ice cream parlor.
En route, Keith said: “Jeffrey wants to ask you out but he’s too shy.”
Jeffrey turned bright red. Alice laughed. Keith explained that he was having a picnic at his parents’ farm that weekend. He already had a date, but Jeffrey didn’t.
“Would you like to go?” Jeffrey finally asked.
“How many other couples are going?” she replied, recalling what she had heard during the summer about Jeffrey’s bold conduct on dates.
“Eight or nine,” Keith volunteered.
“Okay,” Alice replied. “I’ll go if there’s a group.”
As it turned out, all of the other couples except for Keith and his date dropped out. But Alice went anyway and she had a wonderful time with Jeffrey. At dusk, Keith and Jeffrey built a fire in a dry creek bed and spread out blankets to sit on. After a few moments, Keith and his date went for a walk. Jeffrey moved closer to Alice. Nervous, she began talking fast. What tumbled out was a jumbled version of her life story. When she finished, Alice pelted Jeffrey with questions about his past. He was more guarded, but Alice was so persistent that he ended up telling her much more than he intended. He liked her.
As the fire crackled, Alice and Jeffrey discovered that they had come from much different backgrounds. Alice’s family was poor. Jeffrey’s was well off. Alice had low self-esteem. Jeffrey was arrogant. Yet psychologists would later testify that they had one common bond. They were desperately searching for someone who would love them.
Born in Independence on January 21, 1951, Alice was the oldest of four children. Her parents had both moved to Independence because of the RLDS Church’s belief that it is where Jesus Christ will return and build Zion, a perfect city of peace and beauty. Ralph Keehler had met Donna at an RLDS church service shortly after World War II. They married in 1947 and he went to work as a welder. She stayed at home and raised four children.
For the first thirteen years of her life, what Alice wanted she generally got. New dresses, shoes, spending money—it wasn’t that Ralph earned a huge salary. He didn’t. But both parents put their children’s desires first. If there wasn’t enough money, Ralph and Donna would scrimp to get it. “Alice was very, very, very spoiled as a youngster,” Donna recalled later. “All my kids were. I wanted them that way really. You see, I wanted them to have all the things that I never had, so if they wanted something, we generally did whatever we could to get it for them.” Donna had been the youngest of eight children. Ralph was number eight in a line of nine.
One day in 1964, Ralph felt a pain in his right leg. By nighttime, he had lost all feeling in it. The next day, doctors diagnosed him as having multiple sclerosis. It was difficult for him to walk. He was put on disability. Donna, who had never finished high school, was forced to go to work. She was hired as a cook at an all-night cafe and worked from seven P.M. until seven A.M., leaving Alice to run the home. “It was very difficult for Alice to understand,” her mother said. “When she wanted a new dress, I’d tell her, ‘I’m sorry, honey, but we can’t do that anymore. We can’t afford it.’ And that made her angry. I think she felt cheated.”
Alice’s role as a surrogate parent often put her at odds with her sisters, Susan and Terri, ages eleven and seven, and brother, Charles, age two. She was the nag who demanded that her sisters pick up their clothes, make their beds, do their homework. Susan and Terri were best friends and rough-and-tough tomboys. Alice was, in the words of her younger siblings, picky and prissy. Her escape from the family was the church. “I think the thing that I loved most about church was that they truly welcomed me there,” she later told a psychologist. “I was loved and accepted and I didn’t always feel loved and accepted at home. I felt alone and insecure.”
Alice had officially become a “latter day saint” at age five in Independence when she was baptized .by Carlos Kroesen who, in the close-knit world of the Mormon church, happened to be Jeffrey Lundgren’s uncle. But it was as a teenager that Alice really became engulfed in religion. She rarely missed a service, participated in every youth activity, and developed a chilling certainty to her beliefs. While others might doubt Joseph Smith, Jr.’s unconventional claims and teachings, Alice didn’t.
“Alice always wanted to be the center of attention,” her sister Susan Keehler Yates said later. “She loved being in the spotlight, and at church, she was on center stage.” Alice was particularly revered after she told the congregation about her experiences at summer camp and her bedroom bout with the devil. But at home, her sisters and brother viewed Alice’s claims with skepticism. “Alice lives in her own little fantasy world and always has,” brother Charles Keehler said later. “When we were growing up, she had her own room and she would go in there and fantasize about this and that.” Alice was always looking for some knight in shining armor to come carry her away, he said. Alice’s sister Susan agreed. “I’m not certain Alice knows sometimes the difference between the truth and lies. Alice has always been able to convince herself that whatever she wants to believe is the truth and nothing else matters. She was that way about religion and that way about her life.”
Jeffrey had grown up in the RLDS Church just like Alice, but no one had ever prophesied over him and he had always questioned claims about visions and prophecy. “I would sit there on Sundays and people would be in tears talking about the Lord’s presence and His love and all these strange events that they claimed had happened to them,” Jeffrey recalled, “and I would think that something was wrong with me because I felt absolutely nothing and nothing had happened to me like what they were describing. I was stone cold to all this emotional drivel.”
Jeffrey went to church because it got him out of the house. The older of two sons born to Donald and Lois Lundgren, Jeffrey came from a well-pedigreed RLDS family. Lois’s parents, Alva and Maude Gadberry, had helped found two RLDS congregations in Independence. Alva was a pastor at both. Maude ran the Sunday-school programs. On the Lundgren side, it was Donald’s mother, Mabel, who was the religious stalwart. She had converted from the Lutheran faith as a young mother and had seen to it that her children rarely missed a service. Mabel later taught Sunday school for thirty years at the Slover Park RLDS congregation in Independence, one of the more prestigious in town. Everyone there called her “Grandma Lundy.” Don and Lois had met at church. They married in 1948. Don rose to the rank of elder, a high-ranking post in an RLDS congregation. On most Sundays, he and Lois could be found sitting and holding hands in the sanctuary.
While Don and Lois were well known at Slover Park, they were not always well liked. Don was considered too opinionated by some, while Lois was viewed as being flashy. “In every church you have your show people who see if they can dress better than anyone else,” a church member later explained. “You know the type—if someone shows up in a fur coat one week, they have to have one the next week. That was Lois Lundgren. Appearances were everything to her.”
Don had spent his early years in rural South Dakota, where he had learned to hunt and fish, and, according to his younger sister, Mary Bennett, had earned a reputation for being a “terror” and “bully.” By the time he had grown into adulthood, Don was no longer a hellion, but he was still seen as “a tough guy,” his brother-in-law George Gadberry said later. Don was a man’s man who spoke his mind, stood his ground, and was prepared to back up what he believed. There were two things, he often told other church members, about which he was fanatical. Don had served in the navy and was an unabashed flag-waving patriot. He also detested slackers. No one had ever given him anything, he was fond of saying.
He had earned his own way, had never welshed on a debt, and couldn’t abide those who did.
Unlike the Keehlers, Don and Lois were well off financially. Don had started as a construction worker but had been put in charge of a work crew that installed microwave towers for the telephone company. He was a handsome man, well built, self-assured, the leathery sort that cigarette companies liked to feature in advertisements. By the early 1960s, Don was earning $100 per day when the average salary in the nation was $100 per week. When George Gadberry got into financial trouble operating a formalwear rental shop in Independence, it was Donald who put up the $5,000 in cash to keep the store open. Eventually, he bought out his brother-in- law, put Jeffrey to work there after school and on weekends, and soon had it operating in the black. No one was surprised when Don sold it for a tidy profit.
Jeffrey would later joke that the reason his father had to earn a good income was because of his mother’s unabashed spending. Lois liked to collect things, and her home was filled with so many knickknacks that it often reminded visitors of a museum. During the first years of their marriage, Lois bought old furniture in secondhand shops and refinished it with painstaking care. Later, when she could afford it, Lois searched area antique stores and brought home their finest pieces. Each room of the house looked as if it had been arranged to be photographed for display in a magazine. As children, Jeffrey and his brother, Corry, who was nearly six years younger, were permitted to sit on the living room sofa only when guests visited. At all other times, they sat on a rug dropped in front of the television.
As a young woman, Lois had chestnut hair, ivory skin, and a figure that other girls envied. Even when she was a grandmother, she bleached her hair blond, dressed immaculately, and had a youthful sparkle.
Jeffrey would later insist, however, that his mother was cold toward him. “My parents were madly in love with each other, so much so that I don’t think they had any love left over for me and my brother. I always had to fight for affection and my parents’ love was always conditional,” he charged. “It was always used as a reward and taken away as punishment when I was inadequate. I loved playing sports, but there was also a lot of pressure. I was always onstage. When the game ended, my parents would want to know how well had I done? How many hits did I get? Had I embarrassed the family? They were completely success orientated and worried constantly about how the Lundgrens looked in the community.”
When Jeffrey played his first basketball game in sixth grade, he scored seven of the team’s eleven points. After the game, his mother harangued him because of the “plopping” noise that his feet had made when he ran up and down the wooden floor. “She was so embarrassed that she made me practice running on my toes in the kitchen while she watched so I’d learn how to run quietly.”
Jeffrey had only one close friend when he was young. Sarah Stotts lived just down the street from the Lundgrens. They first met as toddlers in the church nursery at Slover Park. By the time they were in high school, they had become close friends. “We would talk on the phone a couple hours each day after school about what was happening,” Sarah remembered. “It wasn’t a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. He just happened to be a boy and I happened to be a girl. But for me, talking to Jeffrey was just like talking to one of my girlfriends. He seemed to really understand me and he listened.”
Both felt awkward around others. “Jeff wasn’t popular and neither was I. We were very quiet, but we both wanted to be part of the group at church so we’d encourage each other. I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll play volleyball if you’ll play it,’ and he’d say, ‘I’ll try this if you will try this.”’
Sarah didn’t have a happy home life and she didn’t think he did either. “Jeff never felt that he was good enough for his father. He didn’t think he could please him.”
Jeffrey would later reiterate that same feeling of inadequacy to a psychologist. “No matter what I did, I never felt I was man enough for him. I always wanted an ‘I love you’ but what I got was male-on-male competition. We would play burnout. I’d throw a hardball as hard as I could for him to catch and he’d throw it back to me. I used to endure the pain when I was seven or eight just because I wanted to be with him. I can still remember one of the best moments in my life was when I was a freshman in high school and I had become strong enough to hurt him when I threw the ball back.”
At William Chrisman High School in Independence, Jeffrey excelled as shortstop on the baseball team. He lifted weights every day, and by his senior year, he could throw a pitch close to one hundred miles per hour. But other students considered him a geek. “Here was this guy who wanted to be liked and was shy and afraid to participate, yet when he opened his mouth, he was a know-it-all,” recalled a classmate. “You felt sorry for him until you started talking to him and then you realized that he was arrogant. No one really liked him.”
Jeffrey didn’t have a date to the senior prom so he asked Sarah to go with him. When she suggested that he invite someone he was interested in romantically, Jeffrey appeared hurt. “I don’t like anyone but you,” he told her.
Jeffrey’s graduation picture in the 1968 high school yearbook stuck out. Others boys in the class were shown wearing long hair, a few brandished peace symbols, most were smiling, clearly eager to get on with their lives. And then there was Jeffrey, his hair cut in a 1950s buzz, dressed in a crisp white shirt, narrow tie, and jacket, completely out of step with his classmates. But it was the expression on his face that caught the eye. His uncle George Gadberry would later remember how one day when he was cleaning out a desk drawer, he had come across several school pictures of Jeffrey that had been taken as the boy moved up through the various grades. “Jeff was never smiling. He never seemed very happy as a boy.” The photographs chronicled a boy who seemed to be angry and bitter inside.
During their picnic at Keith Johnson’s farm, Jeffrey told Alice how he had played shortstop in high school and briefly mentioned his parents. But the only comment that she would later recall as odd was something Jeffrey said jokingly, or at least it sounded as if he were kidding. “My mother is not going to like your name,” he told Alice. “She’ll think it is much too plain.” Alice didn’t respond. She was having too good a time. Despite what she had heard about him, Jeffrey was a perfect gentleman. He didn’t even try to kiss her. After Keith and his date returned, the four of them drove back to campus and Jeffrey escorted Alice to the front stoop of the women’s dormitory. He politely asked if he could kiss her good night. Alice nodded.
A few minutes later, Alice was upstairs in her room when she heard the telephone ring in the hall outside her door. There was only one telephone on the entire floor and Alice’s room was the closest to it. She hurried out to answer it, figuring she would page whoever it was for. It was Jeffrey. He wanted to thank her for spending the afternoon with him and he wanted to know what time she was getting up in the morning.
“Why?” she asked, giggling.
“Because I want to be waiting outside to carry your books,” he replied.
“Oh, Jeffrey, you don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I plan to walk you to every one of your classes tomorrow,” he said firmly.
They chatted for a few minutes and then Alice went to bed. The next morning when Alice stepped outside the dormitory, Jeffrey was waiting.
At the time, she thought it was simply wonderful.
Chapter 2
THE Mormon religion that Jeffrey and Alice learned as children was peculiarly American and unlike any other sect. Its founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., claimed he had a vision in 1820 at the age of fifteen while living with his parents on a farm near Palmyra, New York, about thirty miles east of Rochester. At the time, western New York was on the verge of what later became known as the Second Great Awakening—a religious revival marked by impassioned conversions and sensational Elmer Gantry-style tent meetings. So many Methodist circuit riders, itinerant Baptist preachers, and self-proclaimed evangelists swarmed into western New York State that it
was soon nicknamed the “burned over” district because of the hellfire and brimstone preached there. Amid this fervor, young Joseph was trying to decide, as he wrote later, “Who of all these parties are right? Or, are they all wrong together?”
Smith’s questions were answered one day while he was praying alone in the woods. A “pillar of light” fell down around him, he later said, and God and Jesus Christ appeared. It was Christ who told him that the existing churches “were all wrong” and “their creeds were an abomination in his sight.” Christ ordered Smith not to join any denomination but to continue to pray for guidance.
Three years later, while Smith was saying his nightly prayers in his bedroom, an angel named Moroni appeared. The angel said that fourteen hundred years earlier, when he was still a mortal man, he had hidden a book made of golden plates in a stone box about three miles from the Smith farm. The plates contained the history of a band of ancient Hebrews who had traveled from Jerusalem to the New World before the birth of Christ. These Hebrews had settled in the Americas and were the forefathers of the Indians. Their history was nothing less than a volume of holy scriptures that God now wanted brought forth so that “the fullness of the everlasting Gospel” could be known.
Smith found the plates exactly where the angel had told him to look, but Moroni wouldn’t let him take them from their hiding place. During the next three years, Moroni steadfastly refused to surrender the plates, but on September 22, 1827, the angel relented. Along with the plates, Smith was given two magical stones called the Urim and Thummim that were needed to translate the ancient writings into English.