End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

A few of the group, in the meantime, seized the opportunity to escape Jeffrey Lundgren once and for all, finally abandoning their hope that he wasn’t simply a cruel, murdering madman. Among them was a man named Keith Johnson, whose conscience about the Avery murders was eating him alive. And so on December 31, 1989, Keith poured his heart out to Kansas City law enforcement about the murders and everything else he knew about Jeffrey Lundgren. He even drew them a map to the exact location of the Avery family’s grave. That map and a written report of Keith’s story triggered a series of events that led to Chief Yarborough and several of his deputies in the Kirtland, Missouri, police department to arrive at and search the still-abandoned farm on January 3, 1990. Following Keith Johnson’s map, they found the gravesite of the Avery family fairly quickly, and the tragic news of the murdered family buried in a barn quickly captured the attention of the local and national media. Warrants were issued for Jeffrey and Alice Lundgren, their nineteen-year-old son Damon, and ten of Jeffrey’s followers, some of whom turned themselves in the moment they saw the televised reports that the Averys had been found.

On January 7, 1990, Jeffrey Lundgren, his wife, Alice, and their son, Damon, were arrested in their motel room in California. Law enforcement also seized the arsenal of weapons and ammunition the “messiah and great prophet” had assembled. The Lundgren family, after some predictable legal wrangling, were extradited back to Missouri, where they were reunited with their old devotees in jail, awaiting a series of trials.

Alice and Damon Lundgren were each sentenced to five life terms.

Nine of Jeffrey’s followers were given a lesser variety of sentences. Larry Johnson, the informant/hero who’d bravely stepped forward to law enforcement, was given immunity for his testimony.

Despite a stupefying four-hour plea for mercy to the jury that included the claim, “It’s not a figment of my imagination that I can in fact talk to God, that I can hear his voice. I am a prophet of God. I am even more than a prophet,” Jeffrey Lundgren was sentenced to death. As the date of his execution approached, he tried to convince the courts that he was too obese and diabetic to be executed without a “cruel and unusual” amount of pain. The courts didn’t agree, and on Tuesday, October 24, 2006, Jeffrey Lundgren, messiah and great prophet or murderer-liar-philanderer-thief-abuser- narcissist-sociopath, depending on whom you talk to, was executed—his own personal doomsday, I guess, but undoubtedly not what his devoted followers had in mind when he assured them that the end of the world was right around the corner.

The Manson Family

It is common, tragic knowledge that Charles Manson and his “family” of devout followers committed some of the most infamous murders in the history of American crime. At Manson’s command, and under his absolute control, five young people viciously slaughtered seven total strangers in two separate upscale neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area in 1969. The exhaustive publicity of the Manson Family, its brutality, its journey through the court system, and, above all, its diminutive, wild-eyed leader, Charles Manson, has left the indelible memory in most people’s minds of the insanity of a band of “drug-crazed hippies.” And there’s no doubt about it, these killers were drug-crazed, by their own admissions, and they looked and lived like many hippies of the late 1960s, in a communal, unstructured environment.

What often gets lost in the historic infamy of the Manson Family is the fact that, at its core, it was a doomsday cult, with Charles Manson as its messiah. And it’s as clear an example as we’ll ever find of the fact that the Bible can be twisted, turned, and stood on its head depending on the mind and motivations of whoever’s reading it.