End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

Before long the RLDS officials became aware of Jeffrey’s shocking variations on the teachings of the church and confronted him. In response, Jeffrey withdrew his church membership and quit his job. Undoubtedly with the help of stolen church funds, not to mention the increasing number of followers who began handing over their paychecks and other worldly possessions to their new great prophet and messiah, Jeffrey moved his family and his faithful flock to a rented farm in the countryside near Kirtland.

It was at the farm that Jeffrey started wearing military fatigues on a regular basis, including during interminable Bible studies. He accumulated a large arsenal, carried a loaded gun at all times, and interspersed prayer sessions with marksmanship and combat training. He became the sole arbiter of what constituted a sin, which could include anything from withholding a paycheck from him to sitting in the wrong chair at communal dinners. He became the group’s sole recipient of God’s commands, and its sole salvation in the impending war of Armageddon. The final days of this planet were imminent, he warned relentlessly. Without him there was no hope of meeting God and being endowed with eternal life.

Among Jeffrey’s future plans for his spiritual, Godly group was the seizing of the RLDS temple that had banished him. To earn their place on his promised journey to see God Himself, his followers were required not only to overtake the temple but also to promise to kill anyone and everyone who got in their way. The arsenal grew, the combat training intensified, and the endless Bible recitations droned on.

It was February of 1988 when one of the devotees, Kevin Currie, finally caught on that Jeffrey Lundgren wasn’t a messiah or a prophet, he was simply a dangerous, cruel, sociopathic, megalomaniacal thug who used his knowledge of the Bible and his followers’ terror of doomsday, and of him, to achieve complete domination. Currie escaped the farm and fled to Buffalo, New York, fearing Jeffrey’s retribution every step of the way. He contacted the FBI about Jeffrey, his arsenal, the relentless combat training among his blindly

obedient followers, and his plan to seize the RLDS temple. Not completely convinced the report wasn’t a prank, the FBI faxed the information to Kirtland Police Chief Dennis Yarborough. Chief Yarborough took the report seriously and initiated an investigation into Jeffrey Lundgren and his family and followers at the relatively isolated farm.

Unbeknownst to Kevin Currie, the FBI, or the Kirtland police, Jeffrey, thanks to yet another vision, had significantly revised the means by which his flock could earn their place on the journey to see God, and prove their dedication and total obedience to their messiah, Jeffrey Lundgren. Rather than overtaking the RLDS temple, they should focus on a goal much closer to home—they should sacrifice (read “execute”) a family that had been getting on Jeffrey’s nerves ever since they had arrived at the farm. Dennis Avery wasn’t living up to Jeffrey’s idea of a true man and head of the household, often deferring to his wife and letting her make some of the few decisions Jeffrey left to them. Dennis also questioned Jeffrey occasionally during Bible classes, which was an act of heresy. Cheryl Avery, Dennis’s wife, was headstrong and clearly didn’t understand or respect the appropriately subservient, dutiful role of a woman in the household and the group in general. And the Averys’ three daughters, aged fifteen, thirteen, and six, were just plain unruly and disobedient. Add them all up and it was obvious—God would never grant the group forgiveness if they knowingly allowed sin to exist among them, and without God’s forgiveness, there would be no eternity for them. But if the group sent the most egregious sinners in the compound, the Averys, to arrive at the “judgment bar” before the rest of them arrived, God would take out his wrath on the Avery family and spare the followers of their great prophet and messiah, Jeffrey Lundgren.

And so it was that on April 17, 1989, while Alice Lundgren disappeared for a few hours with the youngest children of the group, the Avery family was led one by one to the barn near the main house under a variety of pretexts and executed by the men and women of this devout group and their divine savior, Jeffrey Lundgren. Dennis Avery was the first to be killed. Six-year-old Karen Avery was the last. Their bodies were placed in a pre-dug pit and covered with lime and dirt, with nothing but a few trash bags to mark their mass grave.