July 20, 2022 • 56 mins
Over a decade after she first escaped the clutches of law enforcement, the final suspect in the 4 O’Clock Murders is finally caught. She was living in hiding, for years, in Honduras. She’s charged, convicted and sentenced, but has her imprisonment finally brought the bloody legacy of Ervil LeBaron to an end? Jesse Hyde explores whether the threat of Ervil LeBaron is really over and whether those that spent so long pursuing the cult believe this multigenerational cycle of crime and abuse is finally at an end. Jesse travels back to Colonia LeBaron, where this whole story began, to find some surprising connections being made.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Ye novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and
content that some listeners might find distressing, including references to
child abuse. Previously on deliver Us from Hervill, welcome to
(00:31):
Colonia Lavaria. Well, yeah, come and say hi to Jessee.
We were going to Zion to prepare a place for
Jesus to return. Hervil thought that if he got rid
of Joel, he could just move in and take leadership
with Joel's people. Anyone who opposed him deserved to die,
including a daughter. Herbal was their leader. They thought they
(00:54):
were going to go out and save the world. I
don't know what you know about law work, but nobody
has all the information. Everybody has a little piece, and
that little piece of that little piece of that little piece.
The only way you're going to get Erville is to
break someone substantial in his group. The jury files back
(01:14):
in and the judge says Hervil LeBaron guilty of conspiracy
to commit murder of first degree felony. I think by
the time Irville had died, I knew it really wasn't over.
Because with such an unstable group founded on such erroneous principles,
you never really know what to expect. I'm Gabriella LeBaron,
and my father is irvill Aber. This is the book
(01:38):
of the New Covenant. It's a manifesto of hervill le Baron.
Coult wasn't even a word we knew of. There was
no quote. We were the KG if anything. Yeah, we
called ourselves we were God's Kingdom. I mean, murder was
sort of a of a natural thing with these folks Hebrew.
He gave the authority to the next Brethren line, so
(02:00):
called Aaron. We would do those kind of heavy loaded
prayers in support of the four o'clock murders happening in
the States. It was just surreal. It's like no can
at least happen. It was so shocking. Who did it
and why? This is God's law. We have to do
it otherwise the whole world will go to hell like Armageddon.
(02:24):
The investigation is going nowhere. We don't have any evidence.
Everybody's lying to us. There's a hard core of these
kids that were raised in this environment and are practiced killers.
All the adults were in jail now and we need
to carry on continuing the murder spree. I understand what
it's like to live in a terrorist organization. I understand
how mothers who strapped bombs to their children feel in
(02:48):
the trail is kind of cold for the murders in Texas,
and all of a sudden, Dick Forbes gets this phone call.
They're willing to tell us everything and they want some protection.
This interview is just done called chilling. Richard was straightforward
as a witness. I'm he tell you anything. Jenny was
only killed because she was old enough to be a witness.
(03:09):
How did he feel about killing an eight year old?
What did he tell you that he had to do it?
He was ordered to. We actually had physical evidence that
we could use. We had a story that's stuck together,
and we had people that were in the family willing
to testify. The first trial of the four o'clock murders
(03:40):
began on January eleven. William Hebrew le Baron, Patricia le Baron,
and Douglas Lee Barlow shuffled into the United States District
Court in Houston, Texas, less than a year after Cynthia
le Baron had made that fateful phone call to detect
of Dick Forbes to tell him she was ready to
(04:03):
turn on the Kingdom of God. As the trial began,
you might expect the cops and prosecutors to have felt
some sense of trepidation. After all, this colt had a
history of getting away with killing people. Who knows how
this trial might play out, But to be honest, that
(04:28):
would be injecting false drama into the proceedings because Hebrew
and the two other KOG members on trial weren't going
to dispute their involvement in the killings, which kind of
gave Hebrew's defense lawyer, Tom Berg, an impossible task. I
was a public defender. It would lose most of our cases.
(04:51):
But you do the best you can. You try to
get creative. You try to come up with a theory
that is credible that allows you to stand up in
front of a jury with a straight face and tell
a story that's the story that your client wants presented,
because you're telling his story, not yours, and then the
jury decides. I was willing to fight the case to
try and win it, even if the odds were against us.
(05:12):
Hebrew and the others had given very specific instructions to
their legal team. They wanted the trial, they wanted the form,
they wanted the chance to have their side of the
story told. And I think he'd realized that he was
in jail and he would always be in jail. What
was the justification that he shared with you for the killings?
(05:33):
They believed that they were entitled to this revenge, And
of course throughout you've got this issue of blood atonement,
which for them was the core of their worldview and
religious belief. These are people not only had they personally
offended them, but they had offended the religion and the
(05:54):
only way their souls could be saved was through the
shedding of blood. So yeah, like I said, not in
easy argument for a public defender to put in front
of a Texas jury. But Hebrew and the others felt
God was on their side. He fully believed that he
was right and what he did. And it's twisted logic
(06:16):
for us, but this is how they were raised from
small and so it made sense to them and it
was internally consistent for them to believe this way and
to justify everything they did along those lines. Was there
any remorse for any of the crimes he committed. Yeah,
(06:36):
that the little girl had come with her father that
day was for them not a tragic circumstance, but just
a circumstance. I couldn't find a commonality that I tried
to find with clients, whether it's some kind of connection
that I can use. They truly did believe in this
(06:59):
really warped worldview, that this was mandated by God. How
unusual is that for you to not be able to
find any sort of commonality or affection for a client.
That's rare. That's rare because I can usually at this
stage in my career finds something and everybody, And why
(07:22):
do you think with them? You couldn't because they were
so locked into that worldview. It's not like something you
could reason with. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the
trial came when Cynthia, the defendants sister, took the stand.
(07:42):
It was a closed court the day she came in,
so no one from the audience could intimidate her. By
this point, Cynthia was living in a witness protection program
for her safety. She broke down in tears as she
testified against her brother and sister. And then on January
(08:03):
Tom made his closing statement and he urged the jury
to remember that the accused killers truly believed that they
were carrying out vengeance in the name of God. It
was a very hard argument, and the jury'sall right through it.
You know, they we're out for days and days, but
it was the only argument that we had after a
(08:25):
hunt lasting so many years. The jury returned after just
a few hours. They found Hebrew, Patricia, and Doug guilty
of nine federal charges. No one was surprised with the verdict,
and none of them showed any particular emotion. I think
(08:48):
we all knew what was coming. The jury had no
doubts they were responsible for the killings. There was a
strong impulse amongst them to convict because of how horrible
the facts were. And then the judge imposed a sentence,
and in this case, we already knew what the sentence
was going to be based on everything that had gone before.
(09:11):
It was life, life without parole. At a separate hearing,
in the fall of Richard LeBaron was also sentenced for
his role in the four o'clock killings. In return for
his confession, prosecutors asked the judge for leniency, and the
(09:32):
judge gave it. Richard received five years in prison. That
left just two members from the KOG leadership at large,
Aaron and Tarsa LeBaron, two of the colds most Devout
members from the teams at Novel and I Heart Radio.
(09:58):
This is the final episode of deliver Us from Hervill
episode thirteen, Chasing Ghosts. The crossing between the Mexican border
and Laredo, Texas has a special place in the history
(10:19):
of the Cult of Rbal LeBaron. It's where Erville's former
wife and cult assassin, Rina Channath entered US police custody
in nineteen seventy seven, and two years later, it's where
Irville crossed to his final destination, prison and death. Decades later,
(10:40):
in Detective Dick Forbes and federal prosecutor and Jenny Task
Force veteran David Schwinderman had arranged with border guards at
Laredo to allow Cynthia LeBaron and her sister Jessica into
the US to help them bring down the Kingdom of
God and now in nineteen it's where Aaron le Baron,
(11:04):
leader of the KOG the Final One, Mighty and Strong,
crossed in handcuffs. Getting eron this far had not been easy.
The Jenny Task Force faced two major obstacles. First, they
had to find Aaron, then they had to get him
(11:24):
into America. The first part, surprisingly wasn't that hard. Mexican
cops located Aeron pretty quickly after the conviction of his siblings,
but you know, they weren't about anything give him up
to us until they got some concessions. David Schwinderman learned
that the Mexican cops had swooped up Aaron le Baron
(11:46):
in but the local authorities wanted an exchange eron for
some of their citizens currently being held in the US
awaiting execution in Texas. Seems fair enough to me, but Texas,
being well Texas, the authorities weren't going to permit that.
(12:06):
So there was a standoff, one that eventually went all
the way to the top. U s Attorney General Janet
Reno and Miss Rino then begins to negotiate on our
behalf with the Mexican authorities to get Aaron transferred to
Texas for prosecution. In Texas, no one ever gave up
(12:31):
anybody on death row in Texas. To get Aaron back,
the federal government had to give assurances to Mexico that
Aaron would not be executed for his crimes. Miss Reno
convinced him to send him up to the bridge and
walk him across. Aaron crossed that bridge in Laredo and
was taken to jail, a family ritual now as familiar
(12:54):
to the law barons as the placing of hands on
heads to make someone the next mighty and star on.
As all this was happening with Aaron, his sister, Gabriella LeBaron,
was now no longer a child or a teenager. Even
she turned twenty and was still living in Mexico. The
(13:18):
teenagers she had once idolized were now adults too, and
locked up. Her other siblings wanted nothing to do with
our father's religion, but still she was keeping the faith.
Somehow her siblings would find their way back and we
would go back to normal and go back to establishing
(13:39):
the cult. Normal. For Gabriella, this wasn't teaching English and
Monterey Mexico wearing high heels. Normal, wasn't dating people raised
outside the colt. Normal was military training and gun running,
packing trucks with marijuana, and stealing cars to finance missions
(14:00):
to kill God's enemies. By the summer of news reached
her of Aaron's impending trial. It took place on June
twelfth in the same Houston courtroom where their siblings had
been convicted years before. I was like, he's in jail,
(14:22):
but he's not going to be convicted because God is
going to save him, get him out. Gabriella was convinced
Aaron would somehow be cleared and he'd return with her
to Mexico. But he got convicted. I was like, oh God,
Aaron got forty five years for his part in planning
(14:42):
the four o'clock killings. Gabriella traveled to Phoenix to visit
Aaron in prison. He wasn't just an older half brother
to her. He was still God's profit on Earth, the
person who knew their Father's opus, the Book of the
New Covenant like no other, the One Mighty and Strong.
(15:03):
Gabriella needed Aaron to reassure her about God's plan and
what was next for the Kingdom of God. And then
I went to visit him. He was like, I've been
atheists for a long time. The One Mighty and Strong
was an atheist. That's when I really lost my north Star.
Everything fell out of orbit, you know, it really like
(15:23):
that was very collapsing. So I lost my leader. I
didn't know what to do. It's like, I'm ready to
go back and build the colt, build a KG, but
where do I go? I'm alone? Where do I go?
Where do I talk to? What do I do? So
I prayed and I asked God to show me what
to do. We never got answers. Okay, so this is
(15:45):
a problem with this. Gabriella had a familiar feeling, like
the one she had staring into those flames in Monterrey
as her possessions burned in front of her in that
gesture to a God who was sighed went. And yet
even now in Gabriella still believed God was watching over her,
(16:09):
that all the killing had been for a reason to
build God's kingdom on earth. She hadn't lost faith. I
remember just having this really strong conclusion in my head.
I was like, look, God, if you want me to
go and build the cold, build a COUCHI wasn't the cold,
it was the couch. I'm going to do it. I'm ready.
(16:33):
I was so ready. Just tell me and I'll go.
But meanwhile, I'm here, I don't know what to do.
You're not telling me what to do. So I'm just
gonna do whatever I want to do. And if I
do anything wrong, You'll have to forgive me. I know
that you always forgive the minute you're ready for me
(16:56):
to go back, just tell me what I need to do,
where I need to do, etcetera. But until then, like
starting now, I'm breaking free. I'm doing whatever I want settled. Okay,
how is off the hook? And yet there was a
reason Gabriella kept hope that maybe the Kog was still alive.
(17:20):
There was still one highly influential member of the cult
out there in the world. Tarsa Jackie. Tarsa le Baron
is the second oldest child of Irvil le Baron and
Laura Chanas Laurna you might remember, came from that backbone
(17:43):
family of Hervil's empire, the Channaths, daughter to Thelma, sister
to Victor, Mark, Dwayne, Rena, and Glenn, who I talked
to an episode three. The Kog had murdered Laura when
she tried to leave the cold back in eighty two,
Gabriella told me. At the time of that killing, most
(18:03):
of the children in Lahoya went and camped at the
beach for a few days to be away from the
horror show they knew was about to unfold. Ten years later,
when most of the Kog was rounded up in Arizona
after the four o'clock murders, Tarsa disappeared. She was wanted
for conspiracy to commit murder, witness tampering, and two racketeering charges,
(18:28):
but by the two thousand's she was still a fugitive
on the run from the law. With Tarsa at large,
detectives like Dick Forbes and prosecutors like David Schwinderman couldn't
be sure the bloody legacy of hervill La Baron was
really over. What if somehow the kog was still alive
(18:50):
carrying out the killings of the Book of the New Covenant.
Law enforcement believed Tarsa was actually the colts mastermind, Tarsa
and Jacqueline was the one that was pushing all the buttons.
That's Houston homicide detective John Burmeister and Utah prosecutor David
(19:14):
Swinderman had a similar view. Tarsa, who is the matriarch instantially,
the one that is the protector and preserver of the
Book of the New Covenant, drilling into these kids that
these things have to be done, and so they carry
out this mission. Gabriella also attested to Tarsa's devotion to
(19:34):
the Book of the New Covenants and the theology of
the cult. But she said that just because Tarsa was
devout didn't mean she ran the Kog. As prosecutors and
police believed Jackie was a hardcore extremist. She was definitely
a person that kept everything to the tea um. Whether
(19:59):
she could initiate and say we have to start doing
this as coming strictly from her, I believe that's a
little far fetched, because she's not that kind of personality.
And she got whipped so hard so many times. She
was just strictly slave labor and you had to submit,
(20:21):
and she submitted willingly because she believed that she had
to obey the authority. It's perspectives like this on Kog
members from Gabriella that have changed how I've seen this
whole saga. Rather than seeing the cult members as these
powerful assassins with near superhuman powers of evasion, a picture
(20:45):
emerges from Gabriella of the scared children they had once
been reacting to the routine killing all around them, carried
out by their own family making decisions by committee, with
no single person steering the ship. Not Hebrew, not Aaron,
(21:05):
and certainly not Tarsa. When I ran this perspective by
law enforcement. Well, it's not that they flat out disagreed.
In fact, many concurred that the kids who grew up
in the cult had been products of their environment and
(21:27):
a warped theology. But they also pointed out to me
that the kog are well documented liars and manipulators. And
they asked me, how do you know that what you're
being told is true? It's hard to say. If you
look at the cult collectively, I can see it, yeah,
(21:48):
But to be fair, you could easily say the same
about cops collectively too. And anyway, when it comes to
which version of Tarsa is most accurate, someone pushing all
the button or a reluctant and passive cult member, maybe
the answer lies with the next group of law enforcement
officials to encounter Jackie Tarsa LeBaron. My name is Ted Imperado.
(22:13):
I'm an assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District
of Texas located in Houston. My name is Rick Haynes.
I'm an assistant United States attorney, been a federal prosecutor
for nineteen years. And all you wanted to know how
old I am, I'm sixty two. Rick and Ted are
(22:34):
prosecutors kind of a double act. We've known each other
since ninety three and then we came up together in
the State d A's office. We always tried cases together.
They were introduced to Tarsa in two thousand ten when
an unusual case was thrown their way. The criminal chief
came to us and said, hey, um, we've tried to
(22:54):
get some other prosecutors to work this case, but nobody's
wants to work it. Um. I think there was concerned
with the case because of its history. This history goes
way back, and I think the prosecutors, the two that
turned it down, were familiar with the case and we're
a little bit concerned for their safety. The case all
centered on a fugitive who had suddenly been found after
(23:16):
twenty years on the run. The fugitive daughter of a
polygamous sect leader is in custody tonight. Jacquelin Tarsa le
Baron faces charges in a nineteen quadruple killing. One of
the victims, an eight year old girl. It is Rick
and Ted took the case and they learned more about
Tarsa Tarsa LeBaron. It was her name is Jackie, but
(23:37):
everyone referred to as Tarsa for over a decade she'd
lived in hiding in Honduras. But then in two thousand
and ten she had lived in Honduras long enough that
she could apply for public assistance welfare if you will,
And it was during the point that she was registering
(23:59):
for that that they did a records check and found
she had this warrant out. The last fugitive of the
Kog had been found. She was then extradited and now
was going to face those charges relating to the four
o'clock murders that had sent her siblings to prison. She
(24:20):
was described to us by various members of the family
when we interviewed them as being kind of a driving
force in terms of keeping alive her father's point of
view and the contents of the Book of the New Covenant.
(24:44):
But then they got to meet Tarsa in person and
the reality of this quote unquote driving force that confronted them.
She looked like a long tailed cat in a room
full of rocking chairs. She was scared of her own shadow.
She was not the Jacqueline Tarsa le Baron that we
(25:08):
deal with when we talk about what happened in and
in the years prior. So that's the person that we met.
That's not the person that we learned about and read
about as we investigated the case, and Rick and Ted
were in for a few more surprises. It was just
(25:32):
so unusual. It was unusual when it happened, and it
didn't stop being unusual on the day that she was sentenced.
That's coming up after the break. On June six, two eleven,
(25:56):
Jackie LeBaron reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Her sentencing
hearing began in September two eleven. As prosecutors Rick and
Ted entered a courtroom packed with press and members the public,
there was one person seated there. They were surprised to
see Cynthia LeBaron. Cynthia, you'll remember, had grown up in
(26:20):
the Kingdom of God, but had turned on her brothers
and sisters in ninety two because she feared they're going
to kill her. Cynthia has testified against family members Hebrew,
serving a life sentence because of her multiple life sentences,
so is Patricia. Cynthia had broken down in tears at Hebrew,
Patricia and Doug Barlow's trial as she gave damning evidence
(26:41):
against them, and in ninety three she had entered a
witness Protection program. Now she was in court again, seeing
another sibling cult members sentenced on the back of her evidence.
Yet Cynthia is still, I believe, a love part of
the family. Um. They're very close knit, they support each other,
(27:03):
They're extremely loyal to each other. Cynthia had switched sides
again and was now sitting back amongst the Labaron clan.
I think, oddly enough, this whole investigation into Jacqueline Tarsa
kind of brought them back together, and they kind of
(27:25):
got to convince each other that they weren't going to
kill each other. The family were back together, the ones
that weren't in prison anyway, surviving children and former wives
of hervil LeBaron, but they weren't there as cult members.
They were there to support Tarsa before her sentence was
(27:48):
handed down. This group included Rhenichinov, who at this point
had taken in some of the orphan kids from the
kog to help them build a life outside the colt.
It was September eight, two eleven, when the judge handed
down his sentence and Rick and ted we're in for
their final surprise. Tarsa was sentenced to three years in prison.
(28:14):
What was the atmosphere like during the sentencing. What do
you remember about that moment? I was pissed off Rick.
Rick spoke to the judge during the sentencing. Rick made
our recommendation. The judge disagreed with our recommendation, and then
Rick and he got it had a debate about that.
Rick thought she should have been given more time, and
(28:34):
he told the judge that straight up. But as both
he and Ted pointed out to me, in hindsight, there
wasn't much more the judge could have done. The benchmark
in sentencing had been set by the punishment handed down
to Richard LeBaron back in October. Richard, who had killed
an eight year old child and by this point in
(28:56):
two thousand eleven had been out of prison for years.
The judge actually went very low. He gave him five
years five years in prison for killing a little girl
and her father, and that that gives me heartburn to
this day. Jackie walked free from jail on December two
(29:23):
thousand twelve, released early for good behavior. In the eyes
of the law, former KOGI members like Jackie and Richard
le Baron are no longer a threat to society, no
longer following that path set out by their father, Hervial LeBaron.
(30:12):
We are at a cemetery in Houston. It's a very large,
beautiful cemetery with tall oak trees, pine trees, and the
headstones are really large and some of them are quite ornate.
And we are currently near the grave of hervill LeBaron.
(30:37):
We're trying to find it. If you visit the grave
of hervill Lbaron today, there is no shrine, no flowers.
Even with a map at the cemetery. It took me
and my producer David a long time to find it,
(30:58):
but eventually, oh ah, there it is beloved father, herbal
m le Baron February August. On the day we visited,
(31:18):
it was covered with leaves and branches, so simple headstone
set into the grass. It doesn't look like anyone who's
been here in a while. All around his grave there
are these other graves that are clearly well tended to.
There's one about ten ft away with like a hedge
around it and fresh flowers. And then there is Herbal LeBaron,
(31:44):
who in life thought he was the most important man alive,
and yet no one cares. His grave is entirely ignored.
Coming here, I don't know what I expected, but it
wasn't this. Maybe it was all the time I had
(32:08):
spent pursuing this story and hearing about the devastation Herbal caused.
It felt so alive to me. But here was the
grave of a man who seemed like he had been forgotten.
No pilgrim's burning candles, no one to even sweep aside
the leaves and branches covering his name. Kind of anticlimactic,
(32:32):
But I also thought sort of appropriate. Better that there's
not a shrine to him or a religion that lives on.
But then I discovered a place where Herville's memory is
being kept alive online Facebook. More precisely, a shrine of
(32:58):
sorts under a pay age headed quote a memorial page
in honor of Hervil m. Le Baron, a man whose
name was smeared by narcissists. To be clear, it's not
like this is a huge online fan club. This page
only has seven accounts listed as friends. The last active
(33:19):
post was October two, thou twenty one, but it's still
a little unsettling to scroll through to see the posts.
The general theme being Merville was a scapegoat, others were
really to blame. There are some spooky looking photos of
him and his prime. They've been doctored in a way
(33:42):
that almost makes him look like Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe.
But it's not really the content that is the most
shocking or the reason why even mention it. It's the
fact that I recognize some of the names of the
seven Followers account ounce that seemed to belong to Lynda Johnson,
(34:02):
a former wife the one time Kyog matriarch and expert Forger,
and some of Herville's kids from the Kyog, including Patricia
who murdered her baby and sat in the car waiting
while Richard le Baron murdered Dwayne Shannath and his daughter Jenny.
And Cynthia LeBaron, the daughter of Herville who turned on
(34:25):
everyone with her testimony and essentially brought the Kog down.
And it's the account under Cynthia's name that is the
most active on the page. As I scroll through the posts,
I can't help but wonder is this story really over?
(34:46):
And I'm not the only one asking this question. If
there was one person I wanted to interview more than
any other making this podcast, it was Dick Forbes, the
detective most responsible for bringing the Colt down, but it
seemed like I had missed my chance. In episode four,
(35:06):
when journalist del Van Adda told me about first looking
into the Colt with Dick back in the nineteen seventies,
he told me as much. There was one great detective
named Dick Forbes who has died. Um, I'm pretty sure
he died. Dale isn't often wrong, but he was in
this instance. It turns out Dick is alive. I tracked
(35:34):
down various addresses, but it seemed Dick moved regularly, and
those I interviewed who were still in touch with him
weren't about to give me his address. Because he does
not think the cult of hervill LeBaron are done blood
atoning their enemies. He told me as much on the
phone in a conversation that was mostly off the record.
(35:55):
And he's not the only one. David Schwinderman now lives
about a half hour drive from Salt Lake City, where
he worked as a federal prosecutor in the U. S.
Attorney's Office, and he's still haunted by the Colt too. Literally,
it does affect you and should wake up in the
night kind of screaming sometimes, even though it's been decades
(36:19):
and he's gone to work on cases involving war crimes,
and David believes he's actually dodged a few bullets himself.
Even since the Colt were put behind bars a few
years after we put them in prison. The family members
that were in federal prison, we're using code in magazines
(36:41):
to recruit a bike gang or members of a bicycle
gang to kill me and prosecutors in the federal cases
in Texas. David tells me that prison staff were able
to uncover these messages before an attempt on his life
could be made. But that wasn't the only incident. There
was another one that well, it seemed like a kind
(37:03):
of signature kg lure, a trap the m O for
the Colts. At one point, my wife was called and
told that there was some money at a bank in
Park City that someone had left for our kids are
two boys. The teller said, whoever had left the money
said Dave's wife would need it. It almost sounded like
(37:27):
a threat. Dave's wife Bobby called him, and it was
kind of odd. Bobby called me and said, this is
really strange. What's going on? So I called the marshals
and said, look, this looks very much like one of
the lures that the family uses. We've had this other
situation occur where we know that they were threatening to
(37:48):
kill us, and there was an odd car that followed
my son at home once from school, following him right
up to the house. So we got a hold of
the marshals, and the marshals immediately got the kids out
of school. They did a full investigation, never were able
to figure out who had left the money at money
(38:10):
about two d I think to this day, David thinks
it was a trap. So I asked Gabriella about all this,
about whether the members of the Kyog ruling committee that
she grew up with we're still a potential threat, and
she told me what those former members of the Kog
we're doing today. Doug is extreme Buddhist, and Hebrew is
(38:34):
extreme Christian born Christian, and Trish is into social justice
and mos and atheists and you know, and um, the
cults is just something crazy that happened to all of us.
So like they're not dangerous. There might be a little
bit whatever crazy in their ideas, but not dangerous, like
the cults is, look some crazy. We all are on
(38:55):
the same page about that. Let me just repeat that
in case you missed it. Doug Barlow, the stepson of
Herville and Kyog Assassin. He's in jail for life. He's
a Buddhist. Hebrew, perhaps the most cold blooded killer of
the entire cult, is a born again Christian. He's written
(39:16):
a long and detailed apology for his crimes. Patricia, who
once did Jane Fonda workouts the Mexican desert and accompanied
Richard LeBaron to Jenny and Jayne's murder, is a social
justice warrior and the former One Mighty and Strong Aaron
who Gabriella calls Moe. He's still in prison and he's
(39:39):
still an atheist. Gabriella stays in touch with them. I
asked her about Hebrew. Hebrew doesn't have any bitterness to
anybody right now. He just completely let it all go. Yeah,
he's born again Christian and all he does has been
(39:59):
six hours of and his cell praying for everybody in
the world and the whole family and forgiving anybody that's
ever done any wrong to him. And every time he
calls and I talked to him, he always just talks
about how he's praying and how he's okay, and how
he's fine, And it's like Jel is perfectly fine. It
doesn't care, you know. As long as I have a
(40:21):
place to sit quiet, I'm good. So his turnaround is
pretty impressive. Tarsa, Richard, and Cynthia. They're out of prison.
Some live in the Austin area, not too far from Gabriella.
I asked Gabriella to reach out to them to see
if they might want to speak to me, but they declined.
But then she tells me something remarkable about the family.
(40:45):
So I never cut them out of my life. I
just quit sharing with them, but we would still show
up two parties and stuff, and they would ask me
how I'm doing. But I didn't share my deep dark
struggles or anything with him. But now how we are
now is that we all care about each other, and
everyone's come to their own conclusions about reality and life,
and you know, and some people think the other people
(41:06):
are crazy, but we all love each other and we
have fun times during holidays. Normally we play games and
drink alcohol. And sometimes there are times that we could
all set up a bunch of different card tables and
everyone's playing spades in drinking tones of alcohol into the
wee hours of the morning. In other words, they appear
to be a regular family, like millions of others. But
(41:32):
when it comes to whether this cold is still a threat,
that picture of the kog members today kind of only
answers half my question. Because the individuals who are responsible
for carrying out Evil's doctrine as the Kingdom of God
might be done with it. But what's to stop future
generations from picking up the murderous ideology of Hervil Labaron?
(41:57):
And perhaps that's where the reality your lies that's coming
up after the break. As a journalist, I've been to
some dangerous places in my career, but I would never
(42:18):
knowingly put myself in danger. I'm not the sort of
journalist who enters war zones in a flat jacket and helmet.
And yet at times reporting the story, especially near the end,
I've wondered if there is danger and even telling it,
if the cult of hervill LeBaron could be revived by
(42:38):
a new generation of fanatics who might seek out retribution
against people who show their profit Herville in an unfavorable light,
another generation the cult reborn. It's a dark thought in
a story already full of darkness, a story or where
(43:01):
to be honest sometimes the darkness has been unrelenting, But
this story has light on the horizon too if you
look towards it. Like I said at the beginning of
this podcast, this is a story of resistance and making it.
(43:23):
I've met members of the mainstream Mormon faith and fundamentalist
Mormons who took great personal risk to take down the
hervil Le Baron Colt and to rescue the children still
in it. And then there's Gabriella. Of all the people
I interviewed making this podcast, the person I met who
(43:44):
affected me more than any other, her resistance to the
darkness of her beginnings into her journey from the last
woman standing in the Kog to the woman I met recently.
The story of Gabriella's path after the Kog could be
should be a thirteen part podcast in and of itself.
(44:08):
There was a period while living in Austin that she
went to college parties, worked at a strip club, and
became a dancer, pursued a career in music. There was
a period where, in the early two thousand's, inspired by
je ga Vera, she hitchhiked her way down to southern
Mexico and joined the Zapatistas, and then with the passing
(44:30):
of time, Gabriella had the strength to turn and face
her trauma. Nothing is ever going to work out for
you unless you get to the bottom of your own
personal pain and all this trauma you experienced, everything that
you experienced, all that is going to get in the
way of you if you don't heal it. You have
(44:51):
to go heal all of that and then you can
get back to work. Her recovery, she tells me, has
been slow. At first. It was moment to moment filled
with grief and rage, burning rage. But I had the tools,
so I would channel all this rage in my meditations
(45:14):
and I would write about it. I would write my
rage out, and I would visualize fire, a ball of fire,
and my rage was became a ball of fire, and
all of my rage was going to be absorbed in
that fire. Was there a moment in time where you
could feel that shift, like a particular moment where you
felt happiness for the first time, or safety or peace. Yes,
(45:39):
I was about twenty seven years old. I had my
own little house, duplex, rickety thing in East Austin when
it was still the artist zone, before the big hype happened.
I was painting a lot, and I remember experiencing safety
and peace and be like, I've never had this feeling
(46:01):
ever before in my life. And I I felt like
there was one crack of light that came through a
very dark sky that I had only known the dark
sky in my whole life. So I had have moments
of being exhilarated by music or by something, but just
without all of exhilaration, put all that aside, just as
(46:24):
things are right now. You have coffee, you're on your porch,
you're in this beautiful safe zone. Everything is okay for
this moment, for no reason whatsoever, it's just okay. And
I actually remember that moment and I painted a painting
on that moment, and I called that painting Daylight at
(46:45):
Last Today. Gabriella is a graduate of Cornell University the
Ivy League School in Ithaca, New York. She works for
the State of Texas in the Attorney General's Office, and
maybe it's her career in the justice system that has
played a role in her agreeing to talk to me,
(47:06):
because now that she feels able to share her story,
she hopes it will open up some important conversations for
others on how to heal wounds in fractured communities where
hatred and violence had done seemingly irreparable damage. If we
decide we want to move forward, to walk away from
(47:28):
the darkness and into the light, I feel like, personally,
for myself, and I can speak for some of my
siblings as well, we have survived something horrific in which
we were both the victim and the criminal. Now I
feel like I have a lot to say to the
world about how to care for people who are coming
(47:52):
out of extremely traumatic situations, how to care for the
children of let's say, terrorist groups, or what if you
have of the family of a terrorist group, an environment
in a whole world system where there's little to nothing
in terms of support or understanding on how to help
you get out of that. Instead there are lots of
(48:13):
labels and judgment and discrimination. And suddenly it's like, having
come through this and having fought so hard, that's the
kind of conversation we need to have. It's like we
need to talk about our story out loud so people
know what happens to people when you don't know any
other reality except whatever you grew up in. If we
(48:35):
don't understand how to care for the human being starting
from the children, no matter where they come from, no
matter what their background, and no matter what they've done.
Today in Colonial LeBaron, the Mexican desert town where this
podcast first started, Irvil LeBaron is mostly a forgotten man.
(48:55):
No one says his name. His brother, Joel's dream, how ever,
lives on. Colonial LeBaron has become the type of place
he imagined, and then some. If you stand on the
hill that overlooks the town, the desert floor is covered
with vast orchards of pecan trees. The town has become wealthy.
(49:18):
They're even building a new exclusive gated community in the
hills with a planned golf course. His brother Joel's presence
is everywhere. Inside every home I entered, I saw a
large portrait of him. His followers now number in the thousands.
They don't call themselves Mormons or even members of the
(49:39):
Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times, the
church he started with his brother Herbal. They call themselves
Joel's people. This chill fundamentalist vision of a church built
around liberty rather than force has not only survived, it's flourished.
(50:00):
It might not yet be utopia, but Colonial LeBaron is
a town made up of Catholics and polygamus and mainstream
Mormons and atheists. What they're united around is their history.
Religion has in many ways faded to the background. Gabriella
(50:21):
hasn't yet visited Colonial LeBaron, and she's not yet sure
if she ever will. People from my side of the
family have gone down to Colonial LeBaron and they've had
a great time. They stayed up talking all night long,
telling stories. They were embraced. They call us her lights. Actually,
I just recently begin talking to one cousin who's from
(50:43):
Colonial a Baron, who's a descendant of Joel, and um,
we're just like hey, you know, And I was like,
I'm sorry, what happened to Grandpa? Best I can do?
And he's like, yeah, that's over. You know, it's not
your fault, yep, it is, you know, it's not my fault.
The last time I visited Colonial LeBaron, I met up
(51:04):
with Naoma Stops. She's the person who told me that
story in episode two about gathering up her younger siblings
at night and hiding in ditches when she feared Merville's
people were coming to attack the town. Anyway, I asked
about the dynamic between Joel and the people now called
hervil Lights. Like Gabriella and her siblings. A lot of
(51:26):
Derville's kids have came to Le Baron, and I think
they're coming to seek comfort. I had a very hard
time at the beginning to think that how could they
and that was your father murdered our prophet. How could
you have the gall almost to come and want to
(51:48):
be a part of our people. It's like I almost
felt that it was wrong. But I've learned over the
years that as children, they're not at fault. It's not
their fault that they're parents murdered other members of your family.
So I've learned to have compassion and forgiveness and help
(52:11):
them to integrate so that they don't carry more pain forward,
because they're just as much victims as we are. And
at this point they're fully integrated into the community. Yeah,
fully integrated, And most people the way you are about it,
like forgiving or um. I think the majority, I would say,
(52:33):
I think there's a lot of the older generations that
have more memory than I do as a child, that
they were almost adults. Then I think they have a
harder time with it by far. I asked Naoma's mom,
Larife Stubs, about this too. I wanted to know how
someone who was here from the beginning fills someone who
(52:56):
knew Joel and Hervill intimately saw how Zion be in.
I saw how for a time it fell apart with
the two warring brothers. I asked Larive if she has
forgiven hervil and as followers for what they did. I
think that it's nice to forgive people, but certain things
it's a little bit hard to forgive. But the other
(53:18):
side of it is it's none of your business because
they actually have as much right to live here as
we do. And they're married among this people and mind
your business, and I do, and I'm probably one of
the ones that has the hardest time keeping my much
shut and not talking about it. There's nothing to talk about,
(53:41):
but what good is going on? We definitely have prospered.
Are people aren't poor anymore, and they all love each
other and all the kids. They work out there, they
come home and their whole life has to be with
all their friends and everybody's somebody's a friend too, because
let me tell you something, our people are kids. They
(54:04):
feel free here and we do believe in forgiveness and
faith and how you forgive, you'll be forgiven. Very sky
get up here. That night at Colonial a Baron's Annual
(54:32):
Friendship Fair, there was a large dance, a carnival. I
saw people laughing, hugging, and I felt this energy, this happiness,
this piece you know that feeling when you feel like
your home. Deliver Us from Herville is hosted by me
(55:09):
jesse Hyde and written and reported by me Leona Hamid
and David Waters. Production from Leona Hamid and David Waters.
Sean Glenn and maxw O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang
and Megan Oyinka are researchers. Marianna Gongora is our field producer.
(55:30):
Fact checking by Donya Suleman and Sona Avakian. Production management
from Sharie Houston, Frankie Taylor and Charlotte Wolfe. Austin Mitchell
is our creative director of production. Micha Lee Raw is
our managing editor. Gavin Haynes is our head of development.
Willard Foxton is our creative director of Development. Sound design,
(55:53):
mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Music
supervision by Nicholas l Xander and David Waters. Our music
is composed by Julian Lynch. Special thanks to Scott Anderson,
Scott Carrier, Del van Ada, Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards, Matt O'Mara,
Katrina Norville and Beth and Makluso or In Rosenbaum, Shelby
(56:17):
Shankman and all the team at U t A. For
more from novel, visit novel dot Audio
Ye novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and
content that some listeners might find distressing, including references to
child abuse. Previously on deliver Us from Hervill, welcome to
(00:31):
Colonia Lavaria. Well, yeah, come and say hi to Jessee.
We were going to Zion to prepare a place for
Jesus to return. Hervil thought that if he got rid
of Joel, he could just move in and take leadership
with Joel's people. Anyone who opposed him deserved to die,
including a daughter. Herbal was their leader. They thought they
(00:54):
were going to go out and save the world. I
don't know what you know about law work, but nobody
has all the information. Everybody has a little piece, and
that little piece of that little piece of that little piece.
The only way you're going to get Erville is to
break someone substantial in his group. The jury files back
(01:14):
in and the judge says Hervil LeBaron guilty of conspiracy
to commit murder of first degree felony. I think by
the time Irville had died, I knew it really wasn't over.
Because with such an unstable group founded on such erroneous principles,
you never really know what to expect. I'm Gabriella LeBaron,
and my father is irvill Aber. This is the book
(01:38):
of the New Covenant. It's a manifesto of hervill le Baron.
Coult wasn't even a word we knew of. There was
no quote. We were the KG if anything. Yeah, we
called ourselves we were God's Kingdom. I mean, murder was
sort of a of a natural thing with these folks Hebrew.
He gave the authority to the next Brethren line, so
(02:00):
called Aaron. We would do those kind of heavy loaded
prayers in support of the four o'clock murders happening in
the States. It was just surreal. It's like no can
at least happen. It was so shocking. Who did it
and why? This is God's law. We have to do
it otherwise the whole world will go to hell like Armageddon.
(02:24):
The investigation is going nowhere. We don't have any evidence.
Everybody's lying to us. There's a hard core of these
kids that were raised in this environment and are practiced killers.
All the adults were in jail now and we need
to carry on continuing the murder spree. I understand what
it's like to live in a terrorist organization. I understand
how mothers who strapped bombs to their children feel in
(02:48):
the trail is kind of cold for the murders in Texas,
and all of a sudden, Dick Forbes gets this phone call.
They're willing to tell us everything and they want some protection.
This interview is just done called chilling. Richard was straightforward
as a witness. I'm he tell you anything. Jenny was
only killed because she was old enough to be a witness.
(03:09):
How did he feel about killing an eight year old?
What did he tell you that he had to do it?
He was ordered to. We actually had physical evidence that
we could use. We had a story that's stuck together,
and we had people that were in the family willing
to testify. The first trial of the four o'clock murders
(03:40):
began on January eleven. William Hebrew le Baron, Patricia le Baron,
and Douglas Lee Barlow shuffled into the United States District
Court in Houston, Texas, less than a year after Cynthia
le Baron had made that fateful phone call to detect
of Dick Forbes to tell him she was ready to
(04:03):
turn on the Kingdom of God. As the trial began,
you might expect the cops and prosecutors to have felt
some sense of trepidation. After all, this colt had a
history of getting away with killing people. Who knows how
this trial might play out, But to be honest, that
(04:28):
would be injecting false drama into the proceedings because Hebrew
and the two other KOG members on trial weren't going
to dispute their involvement in the killings, which kind of
gave Hebrew's defense lawyer, Tom Berg, an impossible task. I
was a public defender. It would lose most of our cases.
(04:51):
But you do the best you can. You try to
get creative. You try to come up with a theory
that is credible that allows you to stand up in
front of a jury with a straight face and tell
a story that's the story that your client wants presented,
because you're telling his story, not yours, and then the
jury decides. I was willing to fight the case to
try and win it, even if the odds were against us.
(05:12):
Hebrew and the others had given very specific instructions to
their legal team. They wanted the trial, they wanted the form,
they wanted the chance to have their side of the
story told. And I think he'd realized that he was
in jail and he would always be in jail. What
was the justification that he shared with you for the killings?
(05:33):
They believed that they were entitled to this revenge, And
of course throughout you've got this issue of blood atonement,
which for them was the core of their worldview and
religious belief. These are people not only had they personally
offended them, but they had offended the religion and the
(05:54):
only way their souls could be saved was through the
shedding of blood. So yeah, like I said, not in
easy argument for a public defender to put in front
of a Texas jury. But Hebrew and the others felt
God was on their side. He fully believed that he
was right and what he did. And it's twisted logic
(06:16):
for us, but this is how they were raised from
small and so it made sense to them and it
was internally consistent for them to believe this way and
to justify everything they did along those lines. Was there
any remorse for any of the crimes he committed. Yeah,
(06:36):
that the little girl had come with her father that
day was for them not a tragic circumstance, but just
a circumstance. I couldn't find a commonality that I tried
to find with clients, whether it's some kind of connection
that I can use. They truly did believe in this
(06:59):
really warped worldview, that this was mandated by God. How
unusual is that for you to not be able to
find any sort of commonality or affection for a client.
That's rare. That's rare because I can usually at this
stage in my career finds something and everybody, And why
(07:22):
do you think with them? You couldn't because they were
so locked into that worldview. It's not like something you
could reason with. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the
trial came when Cynthia, the defendants sister, took the stand.
(07:42):
It was a closed court the day she came in,
so no one from the audience could intimidate her. By
this point, Cynthia was living in a witness protection program
for her safety. She broke down in tears as she
testified against her brother and sister. And then on January
(08:03):
Tom made his closing statement and he urged the jury
to remember that the accused killers truly believed that they
were carrying out vengeance in the name of God. It
was a very hard argument, and the jury'sall right through it.
You know, they we're out for days and days, but
it was the only argument that we had after a
(08:25):
hunt lasting so many years. The jury returned after just
a few hours. They found Hebrew, Patricia, and Doug guilty
of nine federal charges. No one was surprised with the verdict,
and none of them showed any particular emotion. I think
(08:48):
we all knew what was coming. The jury had no
doubts they were responsible for the killings. There was a
strong impulse amongst them to convict because of how horrible
the facts were. And then the judge imposed a sentence,
and in this case, we already knew what the sentence
was going to be based on everything that had gone before.
(09:11):
It was life, life without parole. At a separate hearing,
in the fall of Richard LeBaron was also sentenced for
his role in the four o'clock killings. In return for
his confession, prosecutors asked the judge for leniency, and the
(09:32):
judge gave it. Richard received five years in prison. That
left just two members from the KOG leadership at large,
Aaron and Tarsa LeBaron, two of the colds most Devout
members from the teams at Novel and I Heart Radio.
(09:58):
This is the final episode of deliver Us from Hervill
episode thirteen, Chasing Ghosts. The crossing between the Mexican border
and Laredo, Texas has a special place in the history
(10:19):
of the Cult of Rbal LeBaron. It's where Erville's former
wife and cult assassin, Rina Channath entered US police custody
in nineteen seventy seven, and two years later, it's where
Irville crossed to his final destination, prison and death. Decades later,
(10:40):
in Detective Dick Forbes and federal prosecutor and Jenny Task
Force veteran David Schwinderman had arranged with border guards at
Laredo to allow Cynthia LeBaron and her sister Jessica into
the US to help them bring down the Kingdom of
God and now in nineteen it's where Aaron le Baron,
(11:04):
leader of the KOG the Final One, Mighty and Strong,
crossed in handcuffs. Getting eron this far had not been easy.
The Jenny Task Force faced two major obstacles. First, they
had to find Aaron, then they had to get him
(11:24):
into America. The first part, surprisingly wasn't that hard. Mexican
cops located Aeron pretty quickly after the conviction of his siblings,
but you know, they weren't about anything give him up
to us until they got some concessions. David Schwinderman learned
that the Mexican cops had swooped up Aaron le Baron
(11:46):
in but the local authorities wanted an exchange eron for
some of their citizens currently being held in the US
awaiting execution in Texas. Seems fair enough to me, but Texas,
being well Texas, the authorities weren't going to permit that.
(12:06):
So there was a standoff, one that eventually went all
the way to the top. U s Attorney General Janet
Reno and Miss Rino then begins to negotiate on our
behalf with the Mexican authorities to get Aaron transferred to
Texas for prosecution. In Texas, no one ever gave up
(12:31):
anybody on death row in Texas. To get Aaron back,
the federal government had to give assurances to Mexico that
Aaron would not be executed for his crimes. Miss Reno
convinced him to send him up to the bridge and
walk him across. Aaron crossed that bridge in Laredo and
was taken to jail, a family ritual now as familiar
(12:54):
to the law barons as the placing of hands on
heads to make someone the next mighty and star on.
As all this was happening with Aaron, his sister, Gabriella LeBaron,
was now no longer a child or a teenager. Even
she turned twenty and was still living in Mexico. The
(13:18):
teenagers she had once idolized were now adults too, and
locked up. Her other siblings wanted nothing to do with
our father's religion, but still she was keeping the faith.
Somehow her siblings would find their way back and we
would go back to normal and go back to establishing
(13:39):
the cult. Normal. For Gabriella, this wasn't teaching English and
Monterey Mexico wearing high heels. Normal, wasn't dating people raised
outside the colt. Normal was military training and gun running,
packing trucks with marijuana, and stealing cars to finance missions
(14:00):
to kill God's enemies. By the summer of news reached
her of Aaron's impending trial. It took place on June
twelfth in the same Houston courtroom where their siblings had
been convicted years before. I was like, he's in jail,
(14:22):
but he's not going to be convicted because God is
going to save him, get him out. Gabriella was convinced
Aaron would somehow be cleared and he'd return with her
to Mexico. But he got convicted. I was like, oh God,
Aaron got forty five years for his part in planning
(14:42):
the four o'clock killings. Gabriella traveled to Phoenix to visit
Aaron in prison. He wasn't just an older half brother
to her. He was still God's profit on Earth, the
person who knew their Father's opus, the Book of the
New Covenant like no other, the One Mighty and Strong.
(15:03):
Gabriella needed Aaron to reassure her about God's plan and
what was next for the Kingdom of God. And then
I went to visit him. He was like, I've been
atheists for a long time. The One Mighty and Strong
was an atheist. That's when I really lost my north Star.
Everything fell out of orbit, you know, it really like
(15:23):
that was very collapsing. So I lost my leader. I
didn't know what to do. It's like, I'm ready to
go back and build the colt, build a KG, but
where do I go? I'm alone? Where do I go?
Where do I talk to? What do I do? So
I prayed and I asked God to show me what
to do. We never got answers. Okay, so this is
(15:45):
a problem with this. Gabriella had a familiar feeling, like
the one she had staring into those flames in Monterrey
as her possessions burned in front of her in that
gesture to a God who was sighed went. And yet
even now in Gabriella still believed God was watching over her,
(16:09):
that all the killing had been for a reason to
build God's kingdom on earth. She hadn't lost faith. I
remember just having this really strong conclusion in my head.
I was like, look, God, if you want me to
go and build the cold, build a COUCHI wasn't the cold,
it was the couch. I'm going to do it. I'm ready.
(16:33):
I was so ready. Just tell me and I'll go.
But meanwhile, I'm here, I don't know what to do.
You're not telling me what to do. So I'm just
gonna do whatever I want to do. And if I
do anything wrong, You'll have to forgive me. I know
that you always forgive the minute you're ready for me
(16:56):
to go back, just tell me what I need to do,
where I need to do, etcetera. But until then, like
starting now, I'm breaking free. I'm doing whatever I want settled. Okay,
how is off the hook? And yet there was a
reason Gabriella kept hope that maybe the Kog was still alive.
(17:20):
There was still one highly influential member of the cult
out there in the world. Tarsa Jackie. Tarsa le Baron
is the second oldest child of Irvil le Baron and
Laura Chanas Laurna you might remember, came from that backbone
(17:43):
family of Hervil's empire, the Channaths, daughter to Thelma, sister
to Victor, Mark, Dwayne, Rena, and Glenn, who I talked
to an episode three. The Kog had murdered Laura when
she tried to leave the cold back in eighty two,
Gabriella told me. At the time of that killing, most
(18:03):
of the children in Lahoya went and camped at the
beach for a few days to be away from the
horror show they knew was about to unfold. Ten years later,
when most of the Kog was rounded up in Arizona
after the four o'clock murders, Tarsa disappeared. She was wanted
for conspiracy to commit murder, witness tampering, and two racketeering charges,
(18:28):
but by the two thousand's she was still a fugitive
on the run from the law. With Tarsa at large,
detectives like Dick Forbes and prosecutors like David Schwinderman couldn't
be sure the bloody legacy of hervill La Baron was
really over. What if somehow the kog was still alive
(18:50):
carrying out the killings of the Book of the New Covenant.
Law enforcement believed Tarsa was actually the colts mastermind, Tarsa
and Jacqueline was the one that was pushing all the buttons.
That's Houston homicide detective John Burmeister and Utah prosecutor David
(19:14):
Swinderman had a similar view. Tarsa, who is the matriarch instantially,
the one that is the protector and preserver of the
Book of the New Covenant, drilling into these kids that
these things have to be done, and so they carry
out this mission. Gabriella also attested to Tarsa's devotion to
(19:34):
the Book of the New Covenants and the theology of
the cult. But she said that just because Tarsa was
devout didn't mean she ran the Kog. As prosecutors and
police believed Jackie was a hardcore extremist. She was definitely
a person that kept everything to the tea um. Whether
(19:59):
she could initiate and say we have to start doing
this as coming strictly from her, I believe that's a
little far fetched, because she's not that kind of personality.
And she got whipped so hard so many times. She
was just strictly slave labor and you had to submit,
(20:21):
and she submitted willingly because she believed that she had
to obey the authority. It's perspectives like this on Kog
members from Gabriella that have changed how I've seen this
whole saga. Rather than seeing the cult members as these
powerful assassins with near superhuman powers of evasion, a picture
(20:45):
emerges from Gabriella of the scared children they had once
been reacting to the routine killing all around them, carried
out by their own family making decisions by committee, with
no single person steering the ship. Not Hebrew, not Aaron,
(21:05):
and certainly not Tarsa. When I ran this perspective by
law enforcement. Well, it's not that they flat out disagreed.
In fact, many concurred that the kids who grew up
in the cult had been products of their environment and
(21:27):
a warped theology. But they also pointed out to me
that the kog are well documented liars and manipulators. And
they asked me, how do you know that what you're
being told is true? It's hard to say. If you
look at the cult collectively, I can see it, yeah,
(21:48):
But to be fair, you could easily say the same
about cops collectively too. And anyway, when it comes to
which version of Tarsa is most accurate, someone pushing all
the button or a reluctant and passive cult member, maybe
the answer lies with the next group of law enforcement
officials to encounter Jackie Tarsa LeBaron. My name is Ted Imperado.
(22:13):
I'm an assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District
of Texas located in Houston. My name is Rick Haynes.
I'm an assistant United States attorney, been a federal prosecutor
for nineteen years. And all you wanted to know how
old I am, I'm sixty two. Rick and Ted are
(22:34):
prosecutors kind of a double act. We've known each other
since ninety three and then we came up together in
the State d A's office. We always tried cases together.
They were introduced to Tarsa in two thousand ten when
an unusual case was thrown their way. The criminal chief
came to us and said, hey, um, we've tried to
(22:54):
get some other prosecutors to work this case, but nobody's
wants to work it. Um. I think there was concerned
with the case because of its history. This history goes
way back, and I think the prosecutors, the two that
turned it down, were familiar with the case and we're
a little bit concerned for their safety. The case all
centered on a fugitive who had suddenly been found after
(23:16):
twenty years on the run. The fugitive daughter of a
polygamous sect leader is in custody tonight. Jacquelin Tarsa le
Baron faces charges in a nineteen quadruple killing. One of
the victims, an eight year old girl. It is Rick
and Ted took the case and they learned more about
Tarsa Tarsa LeBaron. It was her name is Jackie, but
(23:37):
everyone referred to as Tarsa for over a decade she'd
lived in hiding in Honduras. But then in two thousand
and ten she had lived in Honduras long enough that
she could apply for public assistance welfare if you will,
And it was during the point that she was registering
(23:59):
for that that they did a records check and found
she had this warrant out. The last fugitive of the
Kog had been found. She was then extradited and now
was going to face those charges relating to the four
o'clock murders that had sent her siblings to prison. She
(24:20):
was described to us by various members of the family
when we interviewed them as being kind of a driving
force in terms of keeping alive her father's point of
view and the contents of the Book of the New Covenant.
(24:44):
But then they got to meet Tarsa in person and
the reality of this quote unquote driving force that confronted them.
She looked like a long tailed cat in a room
full of rocking chairs. She was scared of her own shadow.
She was not the Jacqueline Tarsa le Baron that we
(25:08):
deal with when we talk about what happened in and
in the years prior. So that's the person that we met.
That's not the person that we learned about and read
about as we investigated the case, and Rick and Ted
were in for a few more surprises. It was just
(25:32):
so unusual. It was unusual when it happened, and it
didn't stop being unusual on the day that she was sentenced.
That's coming up after the break. On June six, two eleven,
(25:56):
Jackie LeBaron reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Her sentencing
hearing began in September two eleven. As prosecutors Rick and
Ted entered a courtroom packed with press and members the public,
there was one person seated there. They were surprised to
see Cynthia LeBaron. Cynthia, you'll remember, had grown up in
(26:20):
the Kingdom of God, but had turned on her brothers
and sisters in ninety two because she feared they're going
to kill her. Cynthia has testified against family members Hebrew,
serving a life sentence because of her multiple life sentences,
so is Patricia. Cynthia had broken down in tears at Hebrew,
Patricia and Doug Barlow's trial as she gave damning evidence
(26:41):
against them, and in ninety three she had entered a
witness Protection program. Now she was in court again, seeing
another sibling cult members sentenced on the back of her evidence.
Yet Cynthia is still, I believe, a love part of
the family. Um. They're very close knit, they support each other,
(27:03):
They're extremely loyal to each other. Cynthia had switched sides
again and was now sitting back amongst the Labaron clan.
I think, oddly enough, this whole investigation into Jacqueline Tarsa
kind of brought them back together, and they kind of
(27:25):
got to convince each other that they weren't going to
kill each other. The family were back together, the ones
that weren't in prison anyway, surviving children and former wives
of hervil LeBaron, but they weren't there as cult members.
They were there to support Tarsa before her sentence was
(27:48):
handed down. This group included Rhenichinov, who at this point
had taken in some of the orphan kids from the
kog to help them build a life outside the colt.
It was September eight, two eleven, when the judge handed
down his sentence and Rick and ted we're in for
their final surprise. Tarsa was sentenced to three years in prison.
(28:14):
What was the atmosphere like during the sentencing. What do
you remember about that moment? I was pissed off Rick.
Rick spoke to the judge during the sentencing. Rick made
our recommendation. The judge disagreed with our recommendation, and then
Rick and he got it had a debate about that.
Rick thought she should have been given more time, and
(28:34):
he told the judge that straight up. But as both
he and Ted pointed out to me, in hindsight, there
wasn't much more the judge could have done. The benchmark
in sentencing had been set by the punishment handed down
to Richard LeBaron back in October. Richard, who had killed
an eight year old child and by this point in
(28:56):
two thousand eleven had been out of prison for years.
The judge actually went very low. He gave him five
years five years in prison for killing a little girl
and her father, and that that gives me heartburn to
this day. Jackie walked free from jail on December two
(29:23):
thousand twelve, released early for good behavior. In the eyes
of the law, former KOGI members like Jackie and Richard
le Baron are no longer a threat to society, no
longer following that path set out by their father, Hervial LeBaron.
(30:12):
We are at a cemetery in Houston. It's a very large,
beautiful cemetery with tall oak trees, pine trees, and the
headstones are really large and some of them are quite ornate.
And we are currently near the grave of hervill LeBaron.
(30:37):
We're trying to find it. If you visit the grave
of hervill Lbaron today, there is no shrine, no flowers.
Even with a map at the cemetery. It took me
and my producer David a long time to find it,
(30:58):
but eventually, oh ah, there it is beloved father, herbal
m le Baron February August. On the day we visited,
(31:18):
it was covered with leaves and branches, so simple headstone
set into the grass. It doesn't look like anyone who's
been here in a while. All around his grave there
are these other graves that are clearly well tended to.
There's one about ten ft away with like a hedge
around it and fresh flowers. And then there is Herbal LeBaron,
(31:44):
who in life thought he was the most important man alive,
and yet no one cares. His grave is entirely ignored.
Coming here, I don't know what I expected, but it
wasn't this. Maybe it was all the time I had
(32:08):
spent pursuing this story and hearing about the devastation Herbal caused.
It felt so alive to me. But here was the
grave of a man who seemed like he had been forgotten.
No pilgrim's burning candles, no one to even sweep aside
the leaves and branches covering his name. Kind of anticlimactic,
(32:32):
But I also thought sort of appropriate. Better that there's
not a shrine to him or a religion that lives on.
But then I discovered a place where Herville's memory is
being kept alive online Facebook. More precisely, a shrine of
(32:58):
sorts under a pay age headed quote a memorial page
in honor of Hervil m. Le Baron, a man whose
name was smeared by narcissists. To be clear, it's not
like this is a huge online fan club. This page
only has seven accounts listed as friends. The last active
(33:19):
post was October two, thou twenty one, but it's still
a little unsettling to scroll through to see the posts.
The general theme being Merville was a scapegoat, others were
really to blame. There are some spooky looking photos of
him and his prime. They've been doctored in a way
(33:42):
that almost makes him look like Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe.
But it's not really the content that is the most
shocking or the reason why even mention it. It's the
fact that I recognize some of the names of the
seven Followers account ounce that seemed to belong to Lynda Johnson,
(34:02):
a former wife the one time Kyog matriarch and expert Forger,
and some of Herville's kids from the Kyog, including Patricia
who murdered her baby and sat in the car waiting
while Richard le Baron murdered Dwayne Shannath and his daughter Jenny.
And Cynthia LeBaron, the daughter of Herville who turned on
(34:25):
everyone with her testimony and essentially brought the Kog down.
And it's the account under Cynthia's name that is the
most active on the page. As I scroll through the posts,
I can't help but wonder is this story really over?
(34:46):
And I'm not the only one asking this question. If
there was one person I wanted to interview more than
any other making this podcast, it was Dick Forbes, the
detective most responsible for bringing the Colt down, but it
seemed like I had missed my chance. In episode four,
(35:06):
when journalist del Van Adda told me about first looking
into the Colt with Dick back in the nineteen seventies,
he told me as much. There was one great detective
named Dick Forbes who has died. Um, I'm pretty sure
he died. Dale isn't often wrong, but he was in
this instance. It turns out Dick is alive. I tracked
(35:34):
down various addresses, but it seemed Dick moved regularly, and
those I interviewed who were still in touch with him
weren't about to give me his address. Because he does
not think the cult of hervill LeBaron are done blood
atoning their enemies. He told me as much on the
phone in a conversation that was mostly off the record.
(35:55):
And he's not the only one. David Schwinderman now lives
about a half hour drive from Salt Lake City, where
he worked as a federal prosecutor in the U. S.
Attorney's Office, and he's still haunted by the Colt too. Literally,
it does affect you and should wake up in the
night kind of screaming sometimes, even though it's been decades
(36:19):
and he's gone to work on cases involving war crimes,
and David believes he's actually dodged a few bullets himself.
Even since the Colt were put behind bars a few
years after we put them in prison. The family members
that were in federal prison, we're using code in magazines
(36:41):
to recruit a bike gang or members of a bicycle
gang to kill me and prosecutors in the federal cases
in Texas. David tells me that prison staff were able
to uncover these messages before an attempt on his life
could be made. But that wasn't the only incident. There
was another one that well, it seemed like a kind
(37:03):
of signature kg lure, a trap the m O for
the Colts. At one point, my wife was called and
told that there was some money at a bank in
Park City that someone had left for our kids are
two boys. The teller said, whoever had left the money
said Dave's wife would need it. It almost sounded like
(37:27):
a threat. Dave's wife Bobby called him, and it was
kind of odd. Bobby called me and said, this is
really strange. What's going on? So I called the marshals
and said, look, this looks very much like one of
the lures that the family uses. We've had this other
situation occur where we know that they were threatening to
(37:48):
kill us, and there was an odd car that followed
my son at home once from school, following him right
up to the house. So we got a hold of
the marshals, and the marshals immediately got the kids out
of school. They did a full investigation, never were able
to figure out who had left the money at money
(38:10):
about two d I think to this day, David thinks
it was a trap. So I asked Gabriella about all this,
about whether the members of the Kyog ruling committee that
she grew up with we're still a potential threat, and
she told me what those former members of the Kog
we're doing today. Doug is extreme Buddhist, and Hebrew is
(38:34):
extreme Christian born Christian, and Trish is into social justice
and mos and atheists and you know, and um, the
cults is just something crazy that happened to all of us.
So like they're not dangerous. There might be a little
bit whatever crazy in their ideas, but not dangerous, like
the cults is, look some crazy. We all are on
(38:55):
the same page about that. Let me just repeat that
in case you missed it. Doug Barlow, the stepson of
Herville and Kyog Assassin. He's in jail for life. He's
a Buddhist. Hebrew, perhaps the most cold blooded killer of
the entire cult, is a born again Christian. He's written
(39:16):
a long and detailed apology for his crimes. Patricia, who
once did Jane Fonda workouts the Mexican desert and accompanied
Richard LeBaron to Jenny and Jayne's murder, is a social
justice warrior and the former One Mighty and Strong Aaron
who Gabriella calls Moe. He's still in prison and he's
(39:39):
still an atheist. Gabriella stays in touch with them. I
asked her about Hebrew. Hebrew doesn't have any bitterness to
anybody right now. He just completely let it all go. Yeah,
he's born again Christian and all he does has been
(39:59):
six hours of and his cell praying for everybody in
the world and the whole family and forgiving anybody that's
ever done any wrong to him. And every time he
calls and I talked to him, he always just talks
about how he's praying and how he's okay, and how
he's fine, And it's like Jel is perfectly fine. It
doesn't care, you know. As long as I have a
(40:21):
place to sit quiet, I'm good. So his turnaround is
pretty impressive. Tarsa, Richard, and Cynthia. They're out of prison.
Some live in the Austin area, not too far from Gabriella.
I asked Gabriella to reach out to them to see
if they might want to speak to me, but they declined.
But then she tells me something remarkable about the family.
(40:45):
So I never cut them out of my life. I
just quit sharing with them, but we would still show
up two parties and stuff, and they would ask me
how I'm doing. But I didn't share my deep dark
struggles or anything with him. But now how we are
now is that we all care about each other, and
everyone's come to their own conclusions about reality and life,
and you know, and some people think the other people
(41:06):
are crazy, but we all love each other and we
have fun times during holidays. Normally we play games and
drink alcohol. And sometimes there are times that we could
all set up a bunch of different card tables and
everyone's playing spades in drinking tones of alcohol into the
wee hours of the morning. In other words, they appear
to be a regular family, like millions of others. But
(41:32):
when it comes to whether this cold is still a threat,
that picture of the kog members today kind of only
answers half my question. Because the individuals who are responsible
for carrying out Evil's doctrine as the Kingdom of God
might be done with it. But what's to stop future
generations from picking up the murderous ideology of Hervil Labaron?
(41:57):
And perhaps that's where the reality your lies that's coming
up after the break. As a journalist, I've been to
some dangerous places in my career, but I would never
(42:18):
knowingly put myself in danger. I'm not the sort of
journalist who enters war zones in a flat jacket and helmet.
And yet at times reporting the story, especially near the end,
I've wondered if there is danger and even telling it,
if the cult of hervill LeBaron could be revived by
(42:38):
a new generation of fanatics who might seek out retribution
against people who show their profit Herville in an unfavorable light,
another generation the cult reborn. It's a dark thought in
a story already full of darkness, a story or where
(43:01):
to be honest sometimes the darkness has been unrelenting, But
this story has light on the horizon too if you
look towards it. Like I said at the beginning of
this podcast, this is a story of resistance and making it.
(43:23):
I've met members of the mainstream Mormon faith and fundamentalist
Mormons who took great personal risk to take down the
hervil Le Baron Colt and to rescue the children still
in it. And then there's Gabriella. Of all the people
I interviewed making this podcast, the person I met who
(43:44):
affected me more than any other, her resistance to the
darkness of her beginnings into her journey from the last
woman standing in the Kog to the woman I met recently.
The story of Gabriella's path after the Kog could be
should be a thirteen part podcast in and of itself.
(44:08):
There was a period while living in Austin that she
went to college parties, worked at a strip club, and
became a dancer, pursued a career in music. There was
a period where, in the early two thousand's, inspired by
je ga Vera, she hitchhiked her way down to southern
Mexico and joined the Zapatistas, and then with the passing
(44:30):
of time, Gabriella had the strength to turn and face
her trauma. Nothing is ever going to work out for
you unless you get to the bottom of your own
personal pain and all this trauma you experienced, everything that
you experienced, all that is going to get in the
way of you if you don't heal it. You have
(44:51):
to go heal all of that and then you can
get back to work. Her recovery, she tells me, has
been slow. At first. It was moment to moment filled
with grief and rage, burning rage. But I had the tools,
so I would channel all this rage in my meditations
(45:14):
and I would write about it. I would write my
rage out, and I would visualize fire, a ball of fire,
and my rage was became a ball of fire, and
all of my rage was going to be absorbed in
that fire. Was there a moment in time where you
could feel that shift, like a particular moment where you
felt happiness for the first time, or safety or peace. Yes,
(45:39):
I was about twenty seven years old. I had my
own little house, duplex, rickety thing in East Austin when
it was still the artist zone, before the big hype happened.
I was painting a lot, and I remember experiencing safety
and peace and be like, I've never had this feeling
(46:01):
ever before in my life. And I I felt like
there was one crack of light that came through a
very dark sky that I had only known the dark
sky in my whole life. So I had have moments
of being exhilarated by music or by something, but just
without all of exhilaration, put all that aside, just as
(46:24):
things are right now. You have coffee, you're on your porch,
you're in this beautiful safe zone. Everything is okay for
this moment, for no reason whatsoever, it's just okay. And
I actually remember that moment and I painted a painting
on that moment, and I called that painting Daylight at
(46:45):
Last Today. Gabriella is a graduate of Cornell University the
Ivy League School in Ithaca, New York. She works for
the State of Texas in the Attorney General's Office, and
maybe it's her career in the justice system that has
played a role in her agreeing to talk to me,
(47:06):
because now that she feels able to share her story,
she hopes it will open up some important conversations for
others on how to heal wounds in fractured communities where
hatred and violence had done seemingly irreparable damage. If we
decide we want to move forward, to walk away from
(47:28):
the darkness and into the light, I feel like, personally,
for myself, and I can speak for some of my
siblings as well, we have survived something horrific in which
we were both the victim and the criminal. Now I
feel like I have a lot to say to the
world about how to care for people who are coming
(47:52):
out of extremely traumatic situations, how to care for the
children of let's say, terrorist groups, or what if you
have of the family of a terrorist group, an environment
in a whole world system where there's little to nothing
in terms of support or understanding on how to help
you get out of that. Instead there are lots of
(48:13):
labels and judgment and discrimination. And suddenly it's like, having
come through this and having fought so hard, that's the
kind of conversation we need to have. It's like we
need to talk about our story out loud so people
know what happens to people when you don't know any
other reality except whatever you grew up in. If we
(48:35):
don't understand how to care for the human being starting
from the children, no matter where they come from, no
matter what their background, and no matter what they've done.
Today in Colonial LeBaron, the Mexican desert town where this
podcast first started, Irvil LeBaron is mostly a forgotten man.
(48:55):
No one says his name. His brother, Joel's dream, how ever,
lives on. Colonial LeBaron has become the type of place
he imagined, and then some. If you stand on the
hill that overlooks the town, the desert floor is covered
with vast orchards of pecan trees. The town has become wealthy.
(49:18):
They're even building a new exclusive gated community in the
hills with a planned golf course. His brother Joel's presence
is everywhere. Inside every home I entered, I saw a
large portrait of him. His followers now number in the thousands.
They don't call themselves Mormons or even members of the
(49:39):
Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times, the
church he started with his brother Herbal. They call themselves
Joel's people. This chill fundamentalist vision of a church built
around liberty rather than force has not only survived, it's flourished.
(50:00):
It might not yet be utopia, but Colonial LeBaron is
a town made up of Catholics and polygamus and mainstream
Mormons and atheists. What they're united around is their history.
Religion has in many ways faded to the background. Gabriella
(50:21):
hasn't yet visited Colonial LeBaron, and she's not yet sure
if she ever will. People from my side of the
family have gone down to Colonial LeBaron and they've had
a great time. They stayed up talking all night long,
telling stories. They were embraced. They call us her lights. Actually,
I just recently begin talking to one cousin who's from
(50:43):
Colonial a Baron, who's a descendant of Joel, and um,
we're just like hey, you know, And I was like,
I'm sorry, what happened to Grandpa? Best I can do?
And he's like, yeah, that's over. You know, it's not
your fault, yep, it is, you know, it's not my fault.
The last time I visited Colonial LeBaron, I met up
(51:04):
with Naoma Stops. She's the person who told me that
story in episode two about gathering up her younger siblings
at night and hiding in ditches when she feared Merville's
people were coming to attack the town. Anyway, I asked
about the dynamic between Joel and the people now called
hervil Lights. Like Gabriella and her siblings. A lot of
(51:26):
Derville's kids have came to Le Baron, and I think
they're coming to seek comfort. I had a very hard
time at the beginning to think that how could they
and that was your father murdered our prophet. How could
you have the gall almost to come and want to
(51:48):
be a part of our people. It's like I almost
felt that it was wrong. But I've learned over the
years that as children, they're not at fault. It's not
their fault that they're parents murdered other members of your family.
So I've learned to have compassion and forgiveness and help
(52:11):
them to integrate so that they don't carry more pain forward,
because they're just as much victims as we are. And
at this point they're fully integrated into the community. Yeah,
fully integrated, And most people the way you are about it,
like forgiving or um. I think the majority, I would say,
(52:33):
I think there's a lot of the older generations that
have more memory than I do as a child, that
they were almost adults. Then I think they have a
harder time with it by far. I asked Naoma's mom,
Larife Stubs, about this too. I wanted to know how
someone who was here from the beginning fills someone who
(52:56):
knew Joel and Hervill intimately saw how Zion be in.
I saw how for a time it fell apart with
the two warring brothers. I asked Larive if she has
forgiven hervil and as followers for what they did. I
think that it's nice to forgive people, but certain things
it's a little bit hard to forgive. But the other
(53:18):
side of it is it's none of your business because
they actually have as much right to live here as
we do. And they're married among this people and mind
your business, and I do, and I'm probably one of
the ones that has the hardest time keeping my much
shut and not talking about it. There's nothing to talk about,
(53:41):
but what good is going on? We definitely have prospered.
Are people aren't poor anymore, and they all love each
other and all the kids. They work out there, they
come home and their whole life has to be with
all their friends and everybody's somebody's a friend too, because
let me tell you something, our people are kids. They
(54:04):
feel free here and we do believe in forgiveness and
faith and how you forgive, you'll be forgiven. Very sky
get up here. That night at Colonial a Baron's Annual
(54:32):
Friendship Fair, there was a large dance, a carnival. I
saw people laughing, hugging, and I felt this energy, this happiness,
this piece you know that feeling when you feel like
your home. Deliver Us from Herville is hosted by me
(55:09):
jesse Hyde and written and reported by me Leona Hamid
and David Waters. Production from Leona Hamid and David Waters.
Sean Glenn and maxw O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang
and Megan Oyinka are researchers. Marianna Gongora is our field producer.
(55:30):
Fact checking by Donya Suleman and Sona Avakian. Production management
from Sharie Houston, Frankie Taylor and Charlotte Wolfe. Austin Mitchell
is our creative director of production. Micha Lee Raw is
our managing editor. Gavin Haynes is our head of development.
Willard Foxton is our creative director of Development. Sound design,
(55:53):
mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters. Music
supervision by Nicholas l Xander and David Waters. Our music
is composed by Julian Lynch. Special thanks to Scott Anderson,
Scott Carrier, Del van Ada, Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards, Matt O'Mara,
Katrina Norville and Beth and Makluso or In Rosenbaum, Shelby
(56:17):
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