Ervil LeBaron led a small polygamist sect that he founded in about 1971 after a split with his brother Joel, the head of a fundamentalist church based in northern Mexico. In May 1980 he was convicted in Salt Lake County, Utah, of first-degree murder for ordering the killing of Rulon C. Allred, a naturopathic physician and leader of a rival polygamist group, who was shot in his office in Murray, Utah, on May 10, 1977. He was also convicted of conspiring to kill another brother, Verlan. He was sentenced to life and died in Utah State Prison in August 1981.
That conviction is the only one that stands against him. A court in Ensenada, Mexico, convicted him in 1974 as the "intellectual author" of Joel LeBaron's killing, but an appeals court overturned the verdict. Police and prosecutors linked him to a series of other killings and disappearances in Mexico, California, Utah and Texas between 1974 and 1977, carried out by his wives, children and followers. Some of those followers were tried; LeBaron himself never was. Seven years after his death, four people were shot in Texas by his children and stepchildren, acting on a book of teachings he wrote in prison. He was dead by then and is not responsible in law for those killings, but they belong to the history of the case.
The group should not be confused with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which ended the practice of plural marriage in 1890 and has said it has no relationship with the LeBaron sect, or with the many other Mormon fundamentalist groups, most of which were never accused of violence. Nor should it be confused with the extended LeBaron family in northern Mexico as a whole. Many people share the surname, and some of them were themselves targets of Ervil LeBaron's group.
Ervil LeBaron was born in 1925, one of 13 children of Alma Dayer LeBaron. His grandfather had been among the polygamous Mormons who left the United States for northern Mexico in the late 1880s and founded settlements such as Colonia Juárez and Colonia Dublán in Chihuahua. The descendants of those settlers mostly gave up polygamy. Alma Dayer LeBaron did not. According to a 1977 Washington Post account, he believed he had received a spiritual authority that he could pass to his sons, one of whom would lead the Mormon people. The family moved around Arizona, California, Nevada and Idaho, where most of the children were born, and in 1924 Alma Dayer LeBaron brought his wives and children to Chihuahua and founded what became Colonia LeBaron.
He died in 1951. His sons disagreed about who should carry his authority forward, and several of them led groups of their own. Joel LeBaron headed the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, and in 1963 he established a settlement at Los Molinos, on the Pacific coast of Baja California about 160 miles south of the US border. It became a refuge for polygamous Mormons; Time reported in 1977 that more than 200 people had followed Joel there, nearly half of them excommunicated members of the LDS Church. Ervil was his brother's second in command.
Ervil LeBaron was 6 feet 4 inches tall. Investigators who later pursued him described a man of intelligence and strong personal pull who kept a firm hold on his followers. A Utah polygamist told Time he was combative but persuasive. He eventually married 13 women and fathered, by most press counts, 54 children.
The brothers fell out over religion and over the future of Los Molinos. According to Time, Ervil wanted to develop the coast as a beach resort, while Joel wanted a simple, self-supporting community and held that church authority and civil law should be kept apart. Joel expelled Ervil from the church in 1970. Ervil then founded his own group in San Diego, which he called the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God. Sources give its founding year as 1971 or 1972.
He taught that he was God's representative and claimed the authority to put to death anyone who refused to accept him. He put this in writing. In May 1974 he issued an 87-page tract, Hour of Crisis, Day of Vengeance, warning religious leaders who rejected his authority that they faced death under what he called God's civil law. In October 1974 he and a follower, Daniel Ben Jordan, published A Contest at Law, which claimed the authority to execute impostors and what it called criminal church leaders. In April 1975 a pamphlet titled Response to an Act of War, sent to polygamists in Salt Lake City, warned that their lives were in danger unless they accepted his "political Kingdom of God." A man who later testified against him recalled LeBaron promising those who crossed him "hot lead, cold steel and a one-way ticket to hell."
Joel LeBaron was killed in a house in Ensenada, Baja California, on August 20, 1972. He was beaten and shot. His 14-year-old son, Ivan, later testified that he saw two of Ervil's followers, Daniel Ben Jordan and Gamaliel Rios, leave the house. Ervil publicly claimed credit for the death, Time reported, calling his brother an impostor and false prophet.
A court in Ensenada found Ervil LeBaron guilty in 1974 as the "intellectual author" of the killing, the Mexican legal term for the person who plans or orders a crime, and sentenced him to 12 years. A Mexican appeals court overturned the conviction; Time reported that he had served about 12 months, and ABC News later reported that the reversal turned on a technicality. A follower of Joel told Time that the reversal had been bought with a bribe to local officials. That is an allegation, never proven. Daniel Ben Jordan was also pursued by the Mexican authorities. Accounts of what happened to the case against him differ: one says he was extradited to Mexico and released without trial when witnesses would not testify; another says he was reported killed in a gunfight in Mexico in 1976, a death he was later believed to have faked.
Leadership of Joel's church passed to the youngest brother, Verlan LeBaron. No conviction for Joel's killing stands against Ervil LeBaron, and the murder remains attributed to him rather than proven.
On the night after Christmas 1974, a group of LeBaron's followers drove into Los Molinos in two trucks, threw firebombs into homes and shot at residents who ran out. Two people were killed: Morone Mendez, 16, and Edmundo Aguilar, 24. Reports of the injured range from about a dozen to 19. The main target, according to the Deseret News, was Verlan LeBaron, who was away.
Residents blamed Ervil's group. He was held in Mexico over the raid, Time reported, for about 10 months awaiting trial, and was released after influential officials intervened; the Deseret News reported that a Mexican judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. A month after the raid one of his followers, Raul Rios, tried to shoot witnesses outside the courthouse in Ensenada, but his shotgun misfired and he was caught; he served five months in jail. The New York Times reported in January 1975 that police in San Diego were searching for four suspects who had fled across the border after the attack.
The two deaths at Los Molinos are attributed to LeBaron's orders. No court convicted him of them.
Over the next 30 months, Time reported in 1977, at least ten more opponents of LeBaron disappeared or were found dead. Several of them can be named and dated. None of these deaths was ever tried against Ervil LeBaron.
Noemi Zarate Chynoweth (the name also appears as Naomi) was a former follower who had turned against LeBaron and threatened to go to the police. In January 1975 she was driven away into the desert near Ensenada by Vonda White, one of LeBaron's wives, and was never seen again. In the book Prophet of Blood, the journalists Ben Bradlee Jr. and Dale Van Atta report that White said she shot her on LeBaron's orders and buried her. White was never convicted of this death, which remains an attributed disappearance.
Robert H. Simons was a polygamist from Grantsville, in Tooele County, Utah, who called himself a prophet and would not accept LeBaron's claims. Time reported that he vanished after his wife and a daughter refused to move in with LeBaron. On April 25, 1975, according to the Deseret News, he was led into the desert near Price, Utah, on the pretext of a meeting with a Native American leader, and was shot and buried there. His body was found years later, during the Allred investigation, when a man who had guided him led police to the site. Ed Marston, LeBaron's stepson, was charged with the killing in Carbon County and acquitted. A follower named Lloyd Sullivan said he took part in the killing on LeBaron's orders.
Dean Grover Vest was a former bodyguard of LeBaron, described by Time as a man of about seven feet tall, who had begun telling people he could do without the prophet. On June 16, 1975, he was shot dead in the kitchen of Vonda White's home in National City, near San Diego. White was arrested in Mexico, extradited to San Diego and convicted of first-degree murder for Vest's death; she received a life sentence and was still in a California prison when LeBaron died. The San Diego Reader reported that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed a parole grant for her in 2006 and that she was released on November 18, 2008, after a court challenge to that reversal. Vest's murder is a conviction against White; prosecutors and the press said she acted on LeBaron's orders, but he was never charged with it.
Rebecca LeBaron Chynoweth was Ervil LeBaron's daughter. She had married into the Chynoweth family, which had given LeBaron two of his plural wives. She had complained about life in the group and, according to the Deseret News, had threatened to go to the police unless she was reunited with a son. In April 1977, when she was about three months pregnant, she disappeared near Dallas. Prophet of Blood says she was strangled in a car on her father's orders, and names Ed Marston as the person who killed her and Duane Chynoweth as the driver. Neither man was charged, her body was never found, and no one was arrested. By August 1977, the Washington Post reported, LeBaron's first wife, Delfina, was in hiding with three of her children.
The 1977 Washington Post report listed four further confirmed disappearances of LeBaron followers who were believed dead, and quoted the columnist Jack Anderson's estimate that as many as 20 killings might be traced to LeBaron. These were estimates and allegations, not findings of any court.
The group's threats were not limited to polygamists. In 1976, Time reported, letters signed by a "Society of American Patriots" were sent to the evangelist Billy Graham and to Jimmy Carter, then a presidential candidate, threatening death unless they intervened to free LeBaron. The Secret Service traced the letters to a post office box in Pasadena rented by two of LeBaron's wives. Unsigned letters threatening Carter and leaders of the LDS Church were still under investigation in 1977. No charges over them were reported.
Rulon Clark Allred was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1906. He was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1940 for practicing plural marriage, was convicted and jailed in Utah in 1945 and paroled that December, and then moved for a time to the LeBaron family ranch in Mexico, according to the finding aid for his journals at Utah State University. He worked in Salt Lake County as a naturopathic physician, a licensed role that in Utah at the time allowed him to prescribe medicines and deliver babies. He married seven women and had 48 children. He led the Apostolic United Brethren, a polygamist group that the Washington Post put at 2,000 to 2,500 members in 1977 and that has since been described as one of the more moderate fundamentalist bodies.
He refused to recognize LeBaron's authority. Before his death he received threatening messages, and LeBaron reportedly confronted him and demanded that he pay tithes and accept LeBaron as his religious superior. Prosecutors later said that the motive for the killing was to take control of Allred's group.
On the afternoon of May 10, 1977, two young assailants whom police described as women walked into the waiting room of Allred's office in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City, and shot him several times at close range. Patients in the waiting room saw it happen. Allred died of his wounds. In the account Rena Chynoweth later gave, the two wore wigs and parkas and had been handed their guns by LeBaron's men a few blocks away; Allred's wife, Melba, came in after the shots and tried to stop her; and afterward they met the men again, returned their disguises and left.
According to later accounts by one of the women, the killing was also meant as a trap for Verlan LeBaron. Ervil expected his brother to attend Allred's funeral. An armed group of his followers drove to the high school where the funeral was held but, with police present in force, left without acting.
Allred was succeeded as leader of the Apostolic United Brethren by his brother, Owen Allred, who led the church for the next 28 years.
The case was led by the Murray police and the Salt Lake County Attorney, David Yocom, with help from reporters who did much of the early work. Dale Van Atta, a 25-year-old reporter for the Deseret News, traveled to Mexico, interviewed more than 60 polygamists and found witnesses to LeBaron's hiding places. Murray detectives were respected by other agencies, the Washington Post reported, but worked on a small budget and against widespread fear of LeBaron among potential witnesses. "So many people are afraid of Ervil," a Salt Lake City investigator told Time.
The first person charged was Nancy C., 28, of Littleton, Colorado, accused of criminal conspiracy. In August 1977 Yocom had the charge dismissed so that a preliminary hearing would not expose evidence before other suspects were arrested, saying he wanted all of the alleged conspirators tried together. Charges were eventually filed against LeBaron and six others. LeBaron had gone into hiding in Mexico; in August 1977 Time reported that he had been moving among villages south of Mexico City since May.
LeBaron was arrested in Mexico in 1979 and escorted back across the border by the Mexican authorities. His followers were tried first. Rena Chynoweth, his 13th wife, then 19 and pregnant with his child, was tried in 1979 with three other members of the group. The jury acquitted all of them. Ed Marston and Mark Chynoweth, who had also been charged in the Allred case, were found not guilty. Ramona Marston, a stepdaughter of LeBaron and one of Daniel Ben Jordan's wives, was charged as one of the two women who fired, but she jumped bail and was never tried on the murder charge; she later pleaded guilty to bail-jumping.
Years later Rena Chynoweth said publicly that she was one of the two women who shot Allred. In a television interview broadcast in April 1990 and in her book The Blood Covenant, published that year, she said that LeBaron had told her God wanted a "false prophet" removed and that she believed she was obeying God. She gave a similar account in a sealed deposition in federal court, parts of which became public in 1991. Her acquittal stood. In law she remains what the jury left her: tried and acquitted, and later the author of a public admission.
LeBaron was tried in Salt Lake County in 1980 before Judge Ernest Baldwin, with David Yocom prosecuting. He was not accused of firing a shot; the prosecution case was that he had planned the killing and sent the women and men who carried it out. Witnesses included former members of his group. One of his sons, Isaac LeBaron, gave evidence that helped secure the conviction, and Lloyd Sullivan testified about the threats LeBaron made against those who crossed him.
In May 1980 LeBaron was found guilty of first-degree murder in Allred's death and of conspiring to kill his brother Verlan. The state could have sought the death penalty. Judge Baldwin canceled the penalty phase after a television station broadcast an interview with a church member who accused LeBaron of at least eight murders; the judge ruled that the broadcast had compromised his right to a fair sentencing hearing. LeBaron received two life sentences.
No appeal decision in his case has been reported, and the conviction appears to have stood as final.
LeBaron served his sentence at Utah State Prison in Draper. Prison officials said he was moved from medium to maximum security after trying to organize followers inside, and that he had recently been treated at the prison hospital for psychiatric problems. He had been depressed for weeks, a prison captain said, had sharp swings of mood and was struggling to direct his church and business affairs from his cell. He had recently refused a visit from one of his wives, saying he did not feel well.
In the early hours of Sunday, August 16, 1981, guards saw him doing push-ups at about 1:30 a.m. At the 3:30 a.m. check he was on the floor of his cell, where he often slept. At the 5:30 a.m. check a guard went in and found him dead. He was 56. Investigators found letters in which he wrote that he had gone to meet his maker and would soon see his Heavenly Father; one, addressed to Vonda White, led a detective to suggest a suicide pact, an idea a sheriff's sergeant dismissed. The deputy warden ruled out foul play, since LeBaron was alone in a locked cell. The first autopsy was inconclusive, and officials awaited drug tests before deciding between suicide and an unexplained seizure. Later reports by the Associated Press, the Deseret News and BYU Studies say he died of a heart attack. One of his wives, Anna Mae Marston, claimed his body.
Verlan LeBaron, the brother Ervil had been convicted of plotting to kill, was injured in a car crash near Mexico City on the day Ervil died and died a few days later.
In prison LeBaron wrote about 400 pages of religious instruction, published as The Book of the New Covenants in an edition of about 20 copies held by his followers. Federal prosecutors later described it as giving instructions for killing those who rejected him as prophet, and it named people as "sons of perdition," the sect's term for traitors who had to die. Among them were Daniel Ben Jordan, Ed Marston, and Mark and Duane Chynoweth. David Yocom, who had prosecuted LeBaron, said he and at least two officers were also named. His son Arturo took over the leadership of the group after his death.
The violence did not end with LeBaron. Reports tied a series of deaths and disappearances in the 1980s to his family and former followers. Isaac LeBaron, the son who had testified against his father, died by suicide in June 1983, at 20, a day after leaving a hospital. Arturo LeBaron was killed in Sonora, Mexico, in December 1983; Mexican authorities treated it as a duel and did not investigate. Several of his followers and relatives were reported killed or missing in Mexico. Leo P. Evoniuk, the head of another small church, disappeared near Santa Cruz, California, on May 27, 1987.
Daniel Ben Jordan, who had become a rival leader of a branch of the movement in Colorado, was shot at a deer-hunting camp in Sanpete County, Utah, in October 1987 (UPI gives October 16; the Deseret News, October 19). Investigators focused on LeBaron's relatives and followers; Aaron LeBaron, one of Ervil's sons, was at the camp and was later arrested for menacing the family after the funeral, a charge that was dropped. No conviction for Jordan's death was reported.
None of these events is attributed in law to Ervil LeBaron, who was dead.
At about 4 p.m. on Monday, June 27, 1988, three people were shot dead in Houston and a fourth in Irving, a suburb of Dallas, within a few minutes of each other. All three men had once been loyal members of LeBaron's group and had left it after his conviction.
Mark Chynoweth, 36, ran an appliance business in Houston. He was married to LeBaron's daughter Lillian and was the father of six children. He had told the Houston Chronicle that anyone who left the group was on a hit list and that he was at the top of it, and he had once sought police protection. He was shot at Reliance Appliances.
His brother Duane Chynoweth, 31, had been asked to deliver a washing machine to a vacant house on Rena Street in northwest Houston. He took his daughter Jennifer, known as Jenny, with him. She was 8 years old. Both were shot at the house. Prosecutors later said she was killed because she had seen her father's death.
Ed Marston, 32, LeBaron's stepson, owned an appliance business in Irving. He had been told he could collect appliances at a vacant house in the city, and he was shot there and died later that evening at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.
Police and the FBI suspected the LeBaron family within hours. At least 10 relatives of the Chynoweths were put under police protection. "They're in fear of their lives," a Houston police spokesman said. For almost four years no one was charged. Several of LeBaron's children were arrested soon afterward in Phoenix on auto theft charges and served prison terms in Arizona, but they did not talk about the shootings. In January 1989 Lillian Chynoweth, Mark's widow, died by suicide at her home in Houston; police said she had been treated for depression after her husband's death.
The case turned on another death. Natasha (also spelled Natashia) LeBaron, a young member of the family, had been hiding with the family in Mexico, took a job in Puerto Vallarta and began to want an ordinary life. She was killed sometime between October 1991 and May 1992; Aaron LeBaron, then the group's leader, is alleged to have ordered it; no one is reported to have been convicted of her death. On May 5, 1992, her sister Cynthia LeBaron telephoned Dick Forbes, an investigator for the Salt Lake County Attorney who had worked on LeBaron cases for years, and said she wanted out. Forbes and an assistant US attorney, David Schwendiman, arranged for her and another sister to cross the border and met them in Laredo, Texas, with two Houston detectives. Over two days Cynthia described the planning, the weeks of surveillance and the shootings, and the "sign from God" that had prompted them. She testified under a grant of immunity.
Federal prosecutors in Houston indicted six people in 1992: Aaron LeBaron, William Heber LeBaron, Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron, Patricia LeBaron, Richard LeBaron and Douglas Barlow. The charges included conspiracy, witness tampering, racketeering and obstructing the free exercise of religion, a little-used federal civil rights law. Prosecutors said the money for the operation came from stolen pickup trucks sold in Mexico.
Richard LeBaron, then 21, pleaded guilty to shooting Duane and Jenny Chynoweth and agreed to testify for the government. Under his plea agreement he served five years.
In January 1993 a federal jury in Houston convicted William Heber LeBaron, 29, Patricia LeBaron, 27, and Douglas Barlow, a stepson of Ervil, on civil rights, racketeering and conspiracy counts, and acquitted them on a weapons count. Judge Sim Lake set aside murder-for-hire verdicts. Prosecutors said Heber LeBaron shot Mark Chynoweth, Barlow shot Ed Marston, and Patricia LeBaron was with Richard at the Duane Chynoweth shooting. The US attorney said they were the first convictions in the country under the religious-freedom statute. On May 26, 1993, each received four concurrent life terms, with no possibility of parole, and the three were ordered to pay $134,000 in restitution. "They die in prison," the prosecutor, Terry Clark, said.
Aaron LeBaron, who had led the group from Mexico, was extradited to the United States in April 1996. At his trial in February 1997 prosecutors said he and his half-sister Jacqueline directed the killings by telephone from Mexico. His lawyers called no witnesses and argued that Heber had planned the killings. The jury convicted him on February 28, 1997, after six and a half hours. In June 1997 Judge Lake sentenced him to 45 years, the maximum the federal guidelines allowed, saying he had weighed the seriousness of the crimes against a childhood spent in the group. Aaron LeBaron admitted no wrongdoing and told the court he hoped to do "more good" than his father had done harm.
Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron was a fugitive for more than 15 years. The FBI's Houston office added her to its most-wanted list in 2006, and in 2009 agents asked that she be considered for the national Ten Most Wanted list. She was found in Honduras and arrested in May 2010 after being deported to the United States. On June 16, 2011, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct religious beliefs, admitting that she gave her siblings travel money, and on September 8, 2011, she was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay $134,000 in restitution. The US Attorney's Office described her as the last defendant in the case.
Ervil LeBaron was never charged in connection with the 1988 killings. They are crimes for which others were convicted.
No court ever established how many deaths the group caused, and the estimates have grown over time. Time wrote in 1977 that LeBaron allegedly induced his followers to kill 13 to 20 people. In 1988 the Deseret News reported officials' count of at least 18 former followers killed or missing over 20 years, plus at least five outsiders. UPI reported in 1989 that the group was believed responsible for at least 25 killings, and in 1990 police were quoted as attributing more than two dozen deaths to LeBaron clan violence. In 2017 the retired investigator Dick Forbes told KSL that he counted 28 homicides ordered by LeBaron, and that newer information suggested a total of 30 to 38. These are investigators' and journalists' estimates. The only killing a court has attributed to Ervil LeBaron is Rulon Allred's.
Rena Chynoweth lived under an assumed name after leaving the group. Several of LeBaron's children who grew up inside it later spoke publicly. His daughter Anna LeBaron published a memoir, The Polygamist's Daughter, in 2017, and with her sister Celia was the subject of the ABC News Studios series Daughters of the Cult, released on Hulu in January 2024. Heber LeBaron has said in prison that he renounced the group's beliefs.
The case produced several books: Prophet of Blood by Ben Bradlee Jr. and Dale Van Atta (1981), which the historian M. Guy Bishop, reviewing it in BYU Studies, called well written and thoroughly researched while faulting its lack of footnotes; Rena Chynoweth's The Blood Covenant (1990); and Scott Anderson's The 4 O'Clock Murders (1993), about the Texas killings.
In November 2019, nine women and children from Mormon communities in northern Mexico, members of the extended LeBaron family, were killed in an ambush in Sonora. Some early coverage connected them to Ervil LeBaron. They had no connection to his group or to these crimes; Lindsay Hansen Park, executive director of the Mormon studies foundation Sunstone, noted at the time that many families in the region share the LeBaron name and that some of them had themselves been on Ervil LeBaron's list of enemies.
Proven in court against Ervil LeBaron: ordering the murder of Rulon Allred (first-degree murder) and conspiring to kill Verlan LeBaron, Salt Lake County, May 1980.
Convicted then cleared: the 1972 killing of Joel LeBaron. The Ensenada conviction was overturned on appeal. The claim that the reversal was obtained by a bribe comes from one of Joel's followers, quoted by Time, and was never proven.
Tried against others, never against him: Dean Grover Vest's murder (Vonda White convicted); the Simons killing (Ed Marston acquitted); the Allred shooting itself (Rena Chynoweth and three others acquitted; Ramona Marston never tried on the murder charge). The 1988 Texas killings were committed after his death; William Heber LeBaron, Patricia LeBaron, Douglas Barlow, Richard LeBaron, Aaron LeBaron and Jacqueline LeBaron were convicted for their parts.
Attributed only: the Los Molinos deaths (Mexican case dismissed), the disappearances of Noemi Zarate Chynoweth and Rebecca LeBaron Chynoweth, and the further disappearances listed in 1977. Much of the detail about these comes from the book Prophet of Blood and from police statements, not from trials.
Points on which sources differ: the year the Church of the Lamb of God was founded (1971 or 1972); how long he served in Mexico for Joel's killing (several months or about 12 months); the number wounded at Los Molinos (about a dozen, 13, or 19); how many times Allred was shot (six or seven); Allred's age (reported as 72 and as 77; the Utah State University archive gives his birth year as 1906); the cause of LeBaron's death (inconclusive at first, with notes suggesting suicide; later reported as a heart attack); the date of Daniel Ben Jordan's death (October 16 or 19, 1987); Jenny Chynoweth's age (8 in the federal case and most reports; 10 in some first-day reports); and the ages of Mark Chynoweth (35 or 36) and Ed Marston (32 or 33).
1890: the LDS Church ends the practice of plural marriage.
1924: Alma Dayer LeBaron brings his family to Chihuahua and founds Colonia LeBaron.
1925: Ervil Morrell LeBaron is born.
1951: Alma Dayer LeBaron dies.
1963: Joel LeBaron establishes Los Molinos in Baja California; Ervil is his second in command.
1970: Joel expels Ervil from his church.
1971 or 1972: Ervil founds the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God in San Diego.
August 20, 1972: Joel LeBaron is killed in Ensenada.
1974: Ervil is convicted in Ensenada as the "intellectual author" and sentenced to 12 years; the conviction is later overturned on appeal.
May and October 1974: he issues tracts claiming authority to put opponents to death.
December 26, 1974: Los Molinos raid; Morone Mendez and Edmundo Aguilar are killed.
January 1975: Noemi Zarate Chynoweth disappears near Ensenada.
April 25, 1975: Robert H. Simons is killed near Price, Utah.
June 16, 1975: Dean Grover Vest is shot dead in National City, California.
1976: threatening letters to Billy Graham and Jimmy Carter are traced to the group.
April 1977: Rebecca LeBaron Chynoweth disappears near Dallas.
May 10, 1977: Rulon C. Allred is shot in his office in Murray, Utah.
1979: LeBaron is arrested in Mexico and returned to the United States; Rena Chynoweth and three others are tried for the Allred killing and acquitted.
May 1980: LeBaron is convicted in Salt Lake County of first-degree murder and conspiracy; two life sentences.
August 16, 1981: found dead in his cell at Utah State Prison, aged 56.
1983: Isaac LeBaron dies by suicide; Arturo LeBaron is killed in Sonora.
October 1987: Daniel Ben Jordan is shot dead in Sanpete County, Utah.
June 27, 1988: Mark Chynoweth, Duane Chynoweth, his daughter Jenny, 8, and Ed Marston are shot dead in Houston and Irving, Texas.
January 1989: Lillian Chynoweth dies by suicide.
1990: Rena Chynoweth publishes The Blood Covenant and says publicly that she shot Allred.
May 5, 1992: Cynthia LeBaron contacts investigators; six people are indicted later in 1992.
January 1993: William Heber LeBaron, Patricia LeBaron and Douglas Barlow are convicted in Houston; Richard LeBaron had pleaded guilty.
May 26, 1993: the three are sentenced to life.
April 1996: Aaron LeBaron is extradited from Mexico.
February 28, 1997: Aaron LeBaron is convicted; sentenced to 45 years in June 1997.
2006: the FBI in Houston lists Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron as most wanted.
May 2010: Jacqueline LeBaron is arrested after deportation from Honduras.
June 16, 2011: she pleads guilty; sentenced to three years on September 8, 2011.
January 2024: the docuseries Daughters of the Cult is released.