End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

“It had to be done,” Jeffrey reflected afterward. “It was commanded by God.”

It can only be described as tragic irony that the morning after the murders, the Kirtland police and the FBI arrived at the farm. They knew nothing about the execution of the Avery family that had taken place the night before, so they had no reason to ask about it. Instead, they were there to follow up on rumors that weapons were being amassed and that a takeover of the Mormon temple was being plotted. They found nothing of any specific relevance to those rumors—they could give the farm only a cursory glance since they had no probable cause for a search warrant—and none of Lundgren’s followers volunteered information that could have led law enforcement to the five bodies that had been buried in the barn the night before. Alice Lundgren used the excuse much later that “they [law enforcement] weren’t asking the right questions.” But neither she nor anyone else in the group had helped by coaching the police and the FBI on what those right questions were. Another Lundgren follower, a meek-looking woman in her forties, explained her silence, and her participation in the Avery murders, with the chillingly simple statement, “I was a sinner, and I knew I could be next.”

That same day, the day after the murders and the day the law showed up unexpectedly at the farm, Jeffrey Lundgren divided his followers into small groups and ordered them to leave the farm at intervals during the night. They were to travel to a specific location in Pennsylvania, where he and his family would meet them and give them further instructions. A Kirtland police officer drove past the farm a few days later and found it chilling that the Lundgren camp seemed to have abandoned the property awfully suddenly.

The Lundgren group settled temporarily in Tucker County, West Virginia, where Jeffrey claimed that God would lead him to the Sword of Laban, referred to in the Book of Mormon as a symbol of divine authority and kingship. From there it was off to a barn near Chilhowee, Missouri (without the Sword of Laban, which had somehow eluded Jeffrey’s grasp),

where after a cold winter week Jeffrey disbanded the group, ordering the men to get jobs so that they’d have money to give to Jeffrey when they reconvened in the spring.

Throughout his time in West Virginia and the move back to Missouri, Jeffrey had become even more violent, paranoid, and megalomaniacal than ever. Foxholes, twenty-four-hour-a- day guards, and even an antiaircraft machine gun to shoot down law enforcement helicopters were among the new staples of the group. The married men were ordered to willingly offer their wives to Jeffrey on his whim so that they could be “cleansed with his seed.” Jeffrey knew and thrived on the fact that his followers were now too terrified of him to disobey him, and he reminded them on a regular basis that the same thing could happen to any one of them that had happened to the Averys if he chose. And if constant fear of his wrath wasn’t frightening enough, he also reminded them over and over and over again that the end of the planet Earth was right around the corner, and only he held the key to their survival and to God’s willingness to welcome them into His kingdom.

There was yet another fear holding the group’s devotion to Jeffrey Lundgren together, a psychological angle that’s not uncommon among cult members. Those who were beginning to have doubts about their messiah’s sanctity as a prophet and son of God had to face the fact that if Jeffrey Lundgren was a fraud and a liar, then they had participated in killing five innocent people, three of them children, for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with God or His will. Their basic ability to live with themselves and what they’d done was dependent on believing in Lundgren’s authenticity.

When the group temporarily disbanded, Jeffrey took Alice, their son Damon and the younger children, and loyal devotee Danny Kraft to the warmth of San Diego, California, where he and Alice had lived for a short time after Jeffrey’s tour of duty in the navy.