May 11, 2022 • 50 mins
How was Ervil LeBaron able to instill such devotion among his followers? Devotion that allowed him to commit untold violence and terror. In this episode, Jesse explores how key members of Ervil’s cult were recruited, and how they morphed into a sophisticated organized crime family. In 1977, when the group failed to extort money from a high profile target, Ervil sets his most audacious attack into motion: a double murder intended to take out his biggest rivals. But you can’t organise an assassination without attracting some attention and soon, the press are on Ervil’s trail.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Ya novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and
content that some listeners might find distressing. Previously, on Deliver
(00:25):
Us from Herbal, Hervil thought that if he got rid
of Joel, he could just move in and take leadership
with Joel's people. Well, it didn't work, that's the problem.
After he had murdered Joel, it was always the fear
of them coming an attack in our town. We are
driving toward Los Molinas. They threw an attack. The attack
(00:52):
mostop the attacks were kids went and looked through the
window and at the moment he opened the cord and
he got shut into head in them. He killed my dad.
He should paid for it. And it doesn't matter if
he became possess or obsessed with evil spirit. He doesn't
(01:12):
change the fact that for me, Herbal was a beautiful soul.
I still love Herbal. Oh, yes, a lot deliberous. The
(01:33):
host of the following program is solely responsible for the
program's content. Once for a prophet name Ross, He's had
to roll wise for just one hoss religion he knows,
including UFOs, and in all his houses he's the boss.
Call him please, He's got the keys. Every Friday from
noon to one. He's the mighty, He's the strong, He's
(01:56):
the one. Ross Labara, noon to one Friday. Around the
same time as Irvil LeBaron was forming a cult, having
his own brother killed and attacking the town of Los
Milinos across the border in America, another LeBaron voice was
making waves with his own radio show, older brother to
(02:20):
Irville and Joel. Ross LeBaron opinionated, controversial, but not exactly
a smooth talker. Okay, this is Ross LeBaron, they home.
This will be the first program I done and operated
from the board. Although he certainly didn't lack in self confidence.
(02:41):
I know more about God, about the priesthood, about the prophecies,
about the future and how it operates than any man on.
And just like so many talk show hoss and podcasters today,
Ross was into some pretty out their ideas out when
Adam came here and when he lived in the Garden
(03:02):
of Eden, he had spaceships. You heard that right, spaceships
to take the faithful to Heaven. Space Ships were called
Chair of Them and the Flaming Sword. Ross LeBaron had
already started building these spaceships out in the Chihuahua Desert.
This was back when he lived in colonial LeBaron in
the fifties, but by the sixties he left that Mexican
(03:23):
town and moved his spaceship Operation I guess you could
call it to Utah. And while Joel and Herville were
starting out with those pamphlets to spread the message of
their dream of Zion, Ross saw the power of radio,
initially as a guest on other talk shows and then
with a program of his very own to connect him
(03:43):
with the masses. My therapy on miss program is too full, stale,
Martin is um like Christ will build the Law of Moses.
There is actually a lot I recognize when I or
Ross le Baron on the radio, all his references to
(04:03):
doctrine and covenants. I grew up with these terms too,
So listening in on the scratchy radio clips mixing mainstream
Mormon stuff with talk of rockets to outer space, it's
kind of funny. Funny. You're still when you get to
the show's calling segment, where Ross is often confronted by confused,
(04:24):
sometimes even angry listeners. Hello, uh am, I aunt, this
is John Salas. That's very good. You're good, go ahead, Yeah,
I just wanted to that. They're you know, makes me suggesting,
could you kind of you know, seems to could change
(04:47):
your flat with the behind because when you come on
it than you. But as funny as he sometimes sounds,
it would be foolish to laugh too hard at Ross
labar Arn, to not take him and his kind seriously,
because Ross le Baron and the shows he would make
(05:07):
guest appearances on were a kind of lightning rod for
certain kinds of listeners, often male, usually feeling isolated. They
can't understand why they don't have it better in life.
It's an audience hundreds of podcasters and YouTubers, cable news hosts,
and politicians cater to today this distinctive cocktail of anger
(05:32):
and confusion seething just below the surface, and a sort
of quiet desperation to believe in something where you're at
the center, where you have value and a role to play.
(05:53):
Among the listeners to Ross le Baron in the nineteen
sixties was a man named Lloyd Sullivan. He lived in Vincennes, Indiana.
In the photos I've seen of him, he's wearing thick
coke bottle glasses, dark hair, and a sort of shell
act pompadour. Lloyd Sullivan was of River people's stock, which
(06:15):
means his family was one of many that lived in
shanty boats up and down the Mississippi or Ohio River
Valley after the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties, drifting
looking for work on paper. Lloyd didn't have much going
for him, not that educated, not too smart, orphaned as
(06:36):
a child. Now in his thirties and divorced with a
couple of kids, had a grown son named Don Sullivan,
who followed him like a shadow. Lloyd Sullivan started out
in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,
the church I grew up in, but he started to
find that mainstream Mormon doctrine was too well mainstream, too dull,
(07:01):
so he moved on, initially to a far right group
called the John Birch Society, like a precursor to Q
and On Proud Boys, oath Keepers, et cetera. The society
believed their race made them part of the Chosen Few,
an army of American patriots rooting out the Commies and
(07:22):
restoring the US to its white Christian foundations. That depressingly
familiar rhetoric that echoes through much of today's America. Anyway,
Lloyd Sullivan got bored of that too, and so he
went back to Mormonism, but this time to the fundamentalist groups,
(07:42):
which by the late nineteen sixties had sprung up across
the American Southwest like weeds. But one stood out to Lloyd,
the one he heard about on the radio. Solaine Halt
and the blind will gather with me, and the children
of the kings will be guessed out. The prophecy says,
the streets of saw Lake wool running blood after they've
(08:03):
heard my message. Wait a minute, I imagine I'm thinking,
his ears pricking up while tooling around under a hood
in his garage. This isn't dull. They'll litter be wiped
off as the city literally. This is how Lloyd Sullivan
(08:25):
was pulled into the La Baron orbit. He heard ross
LeBaron in the sixties as a guest on an ultra
conservative radio show in Utah, and Ross LeBaron set him
on a path that would lead him, in just a
few years, right to the heart of Hervil's expanding crime empire.
(08:46):
His story is just one example of what that journey
could look like, but it's similar to so many who
ended up killing in the name of Hervil. LeBaron, raised
in the mainstream Mormon Church, then taken in by the
amis of a return to an old school style of Mormonism,
and then sucked in further by the draw of an
(09:07):
uncompromising leader. Lloyd and his shadow, Don Sullivan, moved down
to colonial LeBaron in seventy two. When Lloyd met Irva
le Baron, it didn't take long four days. In fact,
after arguing theology and the finer points of fundamentalist Mormon doctrine,
Lloyd realized he'd been wrong again. Ross wasn't the one
(09:33):
mighty and strong Herville was. A month later, Joel is dead.
Two years after that, Lloyd and Don Sullivan would be
instrumental in the massacre at Los Milinos. In fact, for
a while, Lloyd and Don Sullivan would become Irvill LeBaron's
(09:54):
most enthusiastic soldiers. What Herba was building with his cruits
he may have called a church, but it had quickly
morphed into something else. A crime family intermarried, so they
became intertwined with Merville's own branch of the Labarns family,
(10:16):
members whose ultimate loyalty would be to him. Within a generation,
his family tree would mushroom splinter multiply into what he
saw as the beginnings of a kingdom, something altogether different
than what had begun in colonial LeBaron. God's kingdom as
(10:38):
a kind of mafia, now bound to each other not
just by faith, but by blood, shaped by a theology
rooted mostly in vengeance. And for those who resisted, who
refused to bend the knee, well, they would face the
same consequences as Joel and the town of Los Milinos.
(10:59):
They would fill the full force of God's wrath. Delivered
by Hervil LeBaron's colt from the Team's at novel and
I Heart Radio. This is deliver us from Herbal I'm
(11:23):
jesse Hyde, Chapter three, Welcome to the Family. Dorothy Solomon
already was just six years old in nineteen when the
(11:45):
two men unexpectedly showed up at her Utah home. They
came in an old, beat up truck. They pulled into
our driveway. They drove too fast, is screeched to a stop.
The Labarns had arrived unannounced Merville with an older brother,
then the one who called himself the Elephant Strangler. This
(12:09):
was back when Rville was still signing up followers for
Joel's church and the La Barren brothers were on a
recruitment drive. We ran into hiding and I watched them
get out of the truck and slammed the doors and
yell anybody home. Dorothy's father was a man named Rulin Alred.
(12:30):
Like the la Barons, he was a polygamist. He had
seven wives and forty eight children, but just one legal wife, Myrtle.
Having just one legal wife is how polygamas avoided prosecution
still do. And it was my father's legal wife, Myrtle,
who met them and told them that Rulin wasn't there,
(12:54):
that they should go away and come back later, and
they said they weren't going to leave until they could
speak to him. The two La Baron brothers decided to
demonstrate just how mighty and strong they really were, and
they started doing push ups in the driveway. That's when
they had the stone spitting contest. They were peculiar. Dorothy
(13:18):
watched as the two men strutted around in front of
the house like two little bantie roosters. They moved with
a kind of redneck self assurance. They moved aggressively, not confidently,
but aggressively. That's why I associate it with redneck men.
(13:41):
There was a very specific reason why the la Barons
were at Dorothy's house that day and why they wanted
to speak to Dr. Alred. He wasn't just the head
of a huge family, but the head of a sort
of growing organization too. Around the same time that Joel
and Herville were built holding their churches, there were a
(14:02):
few large polygamous factions that existed in America, like the Kingston's,
the Short Creek Group, and the Alreds. In a way,
they were kinds of organized crime families too, not killers
like Rvila Barn's offshoot or even violent, but they all
lived in the underground, in the shadows. Their crime was polygamy,
(14:25):
which remember, was illegal. So these families they all sort
of did business with each other or helped each other out.
After all, if you believe in polygamy, it's not that
easy to find a wife. And so these families would
visit each other, intermarry, and some of these families had
built empires, amassed fortunes. Hervill coveted. The Kingston's, for example,
(14:51):
had a catoranche in Nevada, a coal mine in central Utah.
Eventually they would have pawn shops, their own grocery store,
a casino and Cali fournia, and trailer parks in Las Vegas.
From pretty much the start of colonial LeBaron Rvill had
been trying to get rich too. It wasn't just his
(15:12):
Mara Lago style plans for Los Melinos. His cult would
attempt other less glamorous business ventures over the years, from
mushroom farms to washing machine repair businesses. And then, of
course there were their criminal enterprises, from welfare fraud to
stealing cars, which it turned out they were quite good at.
(15:35):
Eventually they'd start stealing cars to order for clients in Mexico,
switched the plates and ship them south of the border.
And yet, for all Rville's efforts to grow his empire,
it paled in comparison to what the other large fundamentalist
communities were building. But Erville didn't want to emulate those
other big fundamentalist organizations. He wanted to consume them money.
(16:04):
After all, as far as he was concerned, he was
the one, mighty and strong, and these other families they
all owed him tithing. The Kingston's, the people in Short Creek,
the Allreds, especially the Alreds you see with them. It
(16:25):
was personal. Irville wanted what they had. He thought he
could get it, He thought he should get it. Shortly
before Dorothy was born, the all Reds had been one
of the first families settling in colonial a Baron. When
(16:48):
they arrived and they got down from the truck that
carried their belongings, they burst into tears because it was
a wasteland. There was a small garden, and otherwise it
was sage brush and rattlesnakes and blackwodow spiders and trunchs.
They might have been polygamist refugees, but they saw the
(17:11):
harsh reality of early life in colonial LeBaron. Less than
a year after they had got down from that truck,
the Alreds got back on it. They rejected the LeBaron
Zion took their chances living polygamy in the shadows back
in the US, and there they had prospered. In Utah,
(17:34):
ruling already established what would become one of the largest
Mormon fundamentalist sects to ever exist. Today, there's still one
of the biggest. If you've ever seen the TV show
Sister Wives, that family comes from the sect ruling started.
And what's more, Rulin already did this without ever needing
to use those grandiose titles Irville or his brothers did.
(17:58):
He never claimed to be a prophet. There are people
who hold him as a prophet, but I heard him
say on different occasions that he was not a replacement
for the leader. And there are many fundamentalists who have
commandeered lives, and commandeered brides, child brides, and done violence
(18:24):
to people, become tyrants over people in the name of
being the one mighty and strong. And I want it
clear that my father never aspired to that. Dorothy grew
up in a big gray house in the foothills of
a place in Utah called Bluff Bell. They had twenty
(18:46):
acres meadows and swamps and skiing hills, and it was
a beautiful place to grow up and all the playmates
you could ever want. Of course, with seven women broke
creating all at once. I had many, many siblings near
my age, and I loved them. The world Dorothy remembers
(19:09):
as a child in Utah was kind of the polar
opposite from the childhood that Stephanie Spencer endured. Stephanie, who
was regularly beaten and humiliated by her fundamentalist parents in
Colonia le Baron. Dorothy's childhood in Utah sounds pretty storybook,
devoid of the violence and fear. With so many kids around,
(19:32):
it was hard for Dorothy to find time with her father.
I used to go out to the barns with him
in the morning, because that was time I could spend
just with him. Nobody else wanted to milk, and my
mother would indulge me. She'd put on my sweater and
wash my face and send me out smiling, and he
(19:54):
helped me milk the cow. And you know, that was
kind of a theme. I wanted to be like my father.
I wanted to have that much respect and power, respect power.
Merville wanted that, and Rulin had it, the kind of
(20:17):
effortless stature Hervill could only dream of, could only covet.
My father was a reluctant leader. He wasn't proselyting, he
wasn't trying to increase his numbers. He was simply trying
to protect those who believed that he was there leader.
(20:38):
And he had a council of men advising him too.
He didn't try to lead by himself. Rulin was a
natural pathic doctor, a healer, a medicine man for the
new age, didn't do surgery, didn't prescribe medicine. It was
all natural homeopathic. He had a thriving actus, mostly fundamentalists
(21:02):
who avoided hospitals because hospitals asked too many personal questions.
That day, when Irville and Ben barged up to Dorothy's
home started doing push ups in the driveway, Rulin was
at his office. Rulin's wife, Myrtle, called him and said
the La Baron boys had showed up, and Rulin was alarmed.
(21:24):
My father came home from his office that day too,
had them off because he was worried about the safety
of his family. He could sense there was a darkness around.
He wrote about it in his journals that he had
disagreements with Therville, who felt strongly that he should be
in charge of not only the mainstream Church of Latter
(21:48):
day Saints, but the United States government. Of course, when
Joel was killed, then everybody's antennas sprang up. After Joel's
death in seventy two, Dorothy remembers her dad returning from Mexico,
where he had attended the funeral in Colonial LeBaron. Arriving home,
(22:12):
he told the family what he had learned. It was
really true, Joel le Baron had been murdered, and it
was Joel's own brother, Herbal, who was responsible. It wasn't
long after that that the alred started to receive chilling threats.
(22:34):
That's coming up after the break. About a month before
Dervil's followers carried out the massacre and Los Milinos, Herville
met with a man in a diner in Salt Lake City.
(22:56):
It was November of seventy four. The man belonged to
the Kingston's, or as they called themselves, the Davis County Coop,
one of those large fundamentalist groups I mentioned earlier. Herville
brag to him he was untouchable. You could try to
shoot him with a pistol, but the pistol wouldn't fire.
(23:17):
God protected him. Hervill also told him that within a
year he'd be the head of a separate nation which
would have power over the whole planet. To do that,
he had to cleanse the earth. He asked for a
meeting with the head of the Kingston Clan. The meeting
was set up and Rville told the Kingston's they owed
(23:38):
him tithing. In fact, all the fundamentalist groups did, the Kingston's,
the Alreds, the council of friends down his Short Creek.
He was the one mighty and strong, and he had
been for twelve years. For twelve years, he'd been asking
for tything, and they hadn't given it, And so Herbal
(24:00):
gave them a deadline. They had until January one, nine,
one year, basically to pay him a ten percent cut
from all their businesses, the cattle ranch, the pawn shops,
the coal mine, or as he put it, there would
be bloodshed. He'd burned their businesses down. Herval had come
(24:24):
as a man of God, but this felt more like
a mafia style shakedown, as they say in Mexico Plata Oploma,
silver or lead. Herville visited Short Creek and the Alreds
and gave them the same ultimatum, pay up or else.
The man was done waiting around. My father actually had
(24:48):
people come and try to protect him during these times
of threat. Dorothy Alred remembers the intimidation wasn't just escalating,
it was becau coming more direct. My mother came home
one night and saw printed in footprints on the deep snow,
(25:10):
we'll be back. This particular threat happened on December, a
few days after the Los Milinos attack. Just as word
of the massacre had started to spread. Now across the border.
Up in Utah, cars were seen prowling around the all
Red compound. Rocks were thrown at their home, and then
(25:34):
someone cut the electricity the phone ring. You think you
were very secure, don't you. There was a string of threats,
pamphlets left on the windshield of his car with handwritten
threats affixed to them, Threats that if he didn't repent
(25:55):
and follow the true prophet, he was going to die.
Up until the spring of seventy seven, these threats against
Rulin Allred had remained just that threats, no actual violence.
One reason for this might have been that Rville was
occupied with another target, his younger brother Virlin LeBaron, Virlin,
(26:21):
who was still head of Colonial LeBaron and the Church
of the Firstborn, the church Ervil had helped start with
his brother Joel. Since the Los Milinos massacre in seventy four,
when Rville had first tried and failed to have Virlin killed,
Merville's hatred for him had only grown with a venom
(26:41):
and passion that even startled some of Rvill's followers. Virlin
knew this, and from seventy four, he was living in hiding.
Herville continued to hunt him through seventy six and into
seventy seven. He attempted further hits, got cult members to
dress in disguise and patrol the streets of Mexican towns
(27:04):
where he thought Virlin might be holed up. They had
orders to shoot to kill on site, but these missions
had also ended in failure. By the spring of seventy seven,
Hervil's more zealous followers like Lloyd Sullivan, We're getting impatient.
Why wasn't this getting done? Lloyd wanted to know. Why
(27:28):
weren't there businesses growing faster. Why weren't they able to
take over these other fundamentalist clans to unite the entire
Mormon Church. Why wasn't their profit Hervill able to deliver.
On April, Herville called a military emergency meeting. He got
(27:52):
up and announced he had a plan to finally get
to Rlin. If they couldn't find him, they draw him
out into the open. His plan was to use a funeral,
the funeral of one of Rlin's close friends, someone who
had married two of Rlin's nieces. Ruling alread Rulin, then
(28:15):
Verlin hervill would take them both out one after the other.
Then maybe people would finally take him seriously pay that
tithing he felt they owed. Rulin's assassination was going to
be the spark that would start the fire. It would
be carried out by one of Gerville's most trusted followers,
(28:36):
from a bedrock family of his crime empire. This particular
family were called the Chinnas. The city of East Layton,
a little north of Salt Lake City, Utah, is surrounded
(28:59):
by pasture and open land in the winter, snow capped mountains.
It's peaceful, but also kind of boring in that way.
Most suburbs are sleepy, well ordered, unremarkable, both figuratively and literally,
more than a thousand miles away from the extremes of
the Chihuahua Desert and colonial a Baron, but it used
(29:23):
to share one key characteristic with that Mexican town. Almost
everyone who lived there was Mormon. This was the upbringing
of Glenn shinaf All right, well, Glenn, First off, thank you. Um.
I'm sitting in Glenn's living room on a cold December morning.
(29:44):
That dog a problem. He's got a couple of little
dogs that he's putting in a kennel off in the
kitchen to keep them from jumping up on me, not
of me. Glenn seventy nine is wearing blue coveralls, sturdy
black boots, thick glasses, blue collars, like all the uncles
I grew up with who worked construction. There's a picture
(30:06):
of Jesus on the wall, like the one my grandpa
had in his double wide trailer. It's all very familiar,
even Homie sitting with him, like we could be related.
Although Glenn and I are a few generations apart. His
upbringing was much more like mine than anything that happened
in colonial LeBaron. We're both products of the mainstream Mormon church.
(30:28):
In both our families, religion was front and center. It
was pretty well the only thing. My dad was worked
out at the Hill Air Fource base. My mom was
very religious. We went to church, went to all the activities,
family prayer, church, basketball games, campouts with the local congregation
(30:50):
up in the mountains Rockwellian. And then of course there
were Glenn's siblings, Mark the musician. Mark was a really
good piano player. Just bring a piano up and he
could just make it, saying younger brother Victor, who was
five years my junior. He was well built. I remember
I couldn't pick him up, and he wasn't fat, he
(31:12):
was just solid built little guy. His little sister, Lorna
age wise, I was closest to her, but she was
a pain in the but little sister to me. And
then there were the two babies of the family, Dwayne
and Rena. You know, I changed their diapers and I
maybe said that happened. There was another sibling to Jerry,
(31:35):
but he died young, aged just seven. Tragedies like this,
I'm not sure how parents ever recover. There were other
tensions in the Chinath family too. You see, Glenn's dad, Bud,
wasn't exactly a devout believer. Sure he went to church,
but he smoked, which is taboo among Mormons, and he
(31:57):
drank a lot. He filled the family room with car parts,
engine blocks, tools. I guess that's why for Glenn's mom, Thelma,
church became sort of a refuge. She was committed baking
a ham for a funeral, showing a quilt for Christmas.
The church became her family too, and so in nineteen
(32:20):
when her brother introduced her to two important looking believers
who were in town from Mexico. She invited them to
visit her home, and that's when the Labarns showed up
and things got pretty rough after that. You know, it's
been a long time since this all happened for you
(32:43):
recalling these memories talking about this, How do you feel
about that? I'm doing okay with it. I'm past the
point where it brings tears. The La Barons arrived in
Glenn's life during that period where Joel and Rville were
still operating as a united front before Rville pulled away
(33:05):
and started his own colt. The two brothers told the
family about the new community they were building down in Mexico.
They should come check it out for themselves. There was
space for the whole family. Joel was you know, I
could see he believed what he believed. I saw no
violence there at that point, and it was hard to
(33:29):
resist what he wanted to do because it was an
easy going, nice, decent guy. But whatever it was the
two men in suits were selling, Glenn wasn't buying. I
couldn't win in a debate or a discussion, but I
I just didn't buy their teachings. It was a confrontation
because they wanted me to think their way, and I
(33:51):
wasn't going to do it, So Glenn started avoiding the
house altogether during their visits, but in his absence, the
labar Ends were finding fertile ground. My mom converted first,
then my sister, oldest sister, this was Laura. She was
(34:12):
just seventeen when Erville arrived and aspiring actress and model, tall,
willowy and beautiful. One day, Laura told her mom she
wanted to marry Herville. Hervill already had three wives and
was a full nineteen years older than Laurna, but Thelma
had converted to and had no objections. Initially, they kept
(34:34):
this a secret from Glen's dad, but Laura told her
dad she was going to take a job at the
Grand Canyon for the summer. When she didn't come back
for school, Filma told him the truth. Their daughter had
married Hervil LeBaron and moved to Mexico, and then she
was gone. That's the last time I saw her ever. Yeah,
(35:00):
once Hervil's claws were into the family, he wasn't going
to stop at Lorna. Thelma wanted to go to Mexico too,
but Bud wasn't so sure, so Thelma moved into her
own room, contemplating divorce. Realizing what was at stake, Bud
quit drinking and smoking, started studying his scriptures, cleaned up
(35:21):
all his tools and engine parts in the front room,
and eventually Bud converted to They all did, only Glenn
held out. The whole family just up and moved. So
I'm at that point pretty well out on my own,
and it was tough on me. By nineteen sixty six,
(35:43):
all the Channaths minus Glenn, had relocated to Mexico to
join the Labeyreans. Their destination was Los Milinos. They thought
they were going to go out and save the world.
Herbal was their leader. He had convinced him that they
could go up say in the world, And they all
got on this ship. And as they went along, I
(36:05):
started thinking, and then it caught on fire. That's coming
up after the break. What Glenn Channath experienced losing his
(36:31):
entire family to the Labaron Colt was one personal tragedy
of many. As Erville built his crime family outward, converting
followers marrying their daughters who would then bear him children.
And because these were polygamous relationships, many wives having many children,
Herville was able to grow his followers at scale rather
(36:54):
than just one by one, and the Channaths would rise
to the highest ranks of his family. They'd become Ervill's
most beloved disciples. To use a word from scripture, mercenaries, assassins, concubines.
That would be the more crass but honestly more accurate
way to put it. Herville had plans for all of them.
(37:18):
Thelma had brains and she was not afraid to speak
her mind. She would become one of Ervill's chief strategists.
Bud had his uses too handy, dependable, but his greatest
gift to Rvill were his kids. After becoming Ervill's wife,
(37:39):
Laura would bear him eight children. Her brother Victor would
become the family's money man, kind of like the infamous
mob accountant Meyer Landski. Rvill would eventually name him Minister
of Finance. Mark, the gifted musician who could have looked
at the kid with a mop of black hair, who
(37:59):
loved one of the corniest bands of all time, the Monkeys,
and seen a straight killer. No one back in East
Layton saw that, but the things Mark would end up
doing with a gun cold blooded. Herville saw that Mark
would become one of the killers of the Los Milinos massacre,
(38:22):
and that would be just the start. Dwayne would also
prove to be deadly with a gun. At Los Milinos.
He had been the attacker, unmasked by his former almost
girlfriend before he drove around the town, burning his neighbor's
houses and shooting into their homes. But of all the Chinas,
none would prove more valuable and for a time more
(38:44):
loved than Glenn's youngest sister, Rena. She too would marry Herville,
bear him children, and like her brothers, she had been
at the Los Milinos attack, watching from the sidelines. But
on April nineteen seventy seven, when Herville held that military
(39:06):
emergency meeting, the one where he outlined his audacious plan
for double murder, first of Rulin Alread, then his own
brother Verlin. At the funeral, it was Rena's turn to
take center stage. She had been selected to kill for Herville,
a murder that set off a chain of events altering
the path of Rvil's Colt forever. On the morning of
(39:36):
May nineteen seventy seven, the hit team arrived in the
Salt Lake Valley, twenty miles south of there. In Bluff Dell.
Dorothy was arriving at her family's compound, I was alarmed
to see that in front of the White House, which
was the original property my father had acquired, there were
(39:56):
these big gouges in the front lawn. They looked like grapes.
With the dirt pile to the side, Dorothy could see
that the barn was being torn down. Maybe the gouges
had something to do with that. Still, she felt unsettled.
And then she heard something tapping on her car window.
(40:19):
And I looked, and I thought I saw my grandmother,
who had lived on that compound with us prior to
her death, and she used to reach through with her
cane and tap on my mother's bedroom window when she
needed help. Well, she was tapping on my window urgently,
(40:40):
and I thought I could hear it. I looked, and
there was nothing there. And then I turned my attention
back and I heard the tapping again. It was the
same experience. And my little girl said ghosts. I didn't
even know she knew that word, and that gave me chill,
(41:01):
and I said, got honey, and she nodded very seriously,
and I shivered. It just kind of stayed with me.
As we left, I looked at those gouged out holes
that looked like graves. Dorothy was due to meet her
(41:23):
dad that day, but she had an invitation to meet
up with a friend, so she had postponed. On her way,
she passed by her father's doctor's office. As we passed
my father's office, I saw two women out in front
when it was in a blue parka, and I got
those chills again. Around this time, two of Hervil's followers,
(41:47):
Ramona Marston and Riena Schnas. We're getting decked out in
strikingly similar outfits. Rena in a blue parka from a
thrift store they shopped at earlier that morning to buy disguises.
They both wore white shirts, dark pants, curly wigs, wire
framed glasses with no lenses. Dorothy drove on continued away
(42:11):
from the city, eventually meeting up with her friend at
a place called the Mountain Dell golf Course. It was
a beautiful day up at Mountain Dell. We came out
about six o'clock, and because we were going down the mountain,
my brother had the radio on and I couldn't hear
what he was saying, and so I leaned forward and said,
(42:33):
will you turn that radio down? Or off, because I
can't hear you. Otherwise I would have heard the news announcement.
We stopped to get food for our children, who were
being babysat at my house. I called to ask what
everyone wanted. My daughter said, Mama, Grandma wants you to
(42:58):
call her right now. And I said, don't you want
something to eat? And she said, Mamma, called grandma right now.
And so I called my mother and she said, Honey,
your dad he's spent shot. And I said, as he, dad,
(43:22):
and she said, yes, she's dead. The all Red family
gathered that night and began to piece together the details
of what happened. One of Rulin's wives had actually been
there at the time of the killing, sitting in the
waiting room. She had witnessed the whole thing. She'd actually
(43:44):
had the murder's weapon pointed at her because she stepped
in the way to try to protect him. At fourte pm,
two women entered Dr. Alred's waiting room, rena hold caliber
from her bulky blue park and fired two shots straight
(44:05):
at the doctor at point blank range. Those were her
orders to destroy the false prophets phase Herville had ordered
the killers to shoot his face, a kind of twisted
additional vengeance against the man he saw as his rival.
My father wasn't a false prophet. He was just a
(44:26):
good man. He was a doctor, and he was kind
and he was a good father. So you know, that's
good that his face wasn't destroyed, but he was still gone.
(44:49):
Just like Naoma Stubbs fearing the bombs, fire and awaiting
gunshots in Colonial LeBaron, Dorothy hadn't just worried about the
terror she was now experiencing. It was like she'd seen
it coming. It feels kind of strange to say that
out loud, but this is the kind of thing people
(45:11):
have told me time after time while reporting the story.
I knew that it was coming, but it didn't make
it any easier. And I was really sorry that I
hadn't been there. And for me, it was if I
(45:31):
kept my appointment, maybe I could have faced her down.
Maybe I could have seized the weapon or talked to her,
spoken to her about what she was doing. Of course,
I probably would have been killed myself. There's that part too,
But I felt a lot of guilt about it not
(45:52):
being there to protect him. The killing was just a prelude,
a way to lure Virlin out into the open. And
it had worked, because now three days after the doctor
ruling all read murder, the funeral was being held. It
(46:17):
was held at Bingham High School and their enormous auditorium.
It was the largest personal funeral held in this state
of Utah, you know, not of a so called public figure,
as Hervil had prophesied. Virlin had left his hiding place
(46:38):
and traveled into Utah. And here he was taking his
seat with all the other mourners in the auditorium. Meanwhile,
waiting across the street in vehicles or three men with
sub automatic rifles with banana eclipse taped together. They're capable
(47:00):
of spewing twenty rounds within seconds. They were prepared to
go in and kill Virlin LeBaron. But this is where
Herbal's plan unraveled because as followers waiting outside in the car,
as the crowds arrived, including Don Sullivan, the son of Lloyd,
(47:22):
and a man named Eddie Marston, were suddenly having second thoughts.
They got scared when they saw the police and the
media and the crowds, and they decided to risk vill
rather than risk the police, and they left for now
(47:50):
another massacre had been avoided. A great many people would
have died because they were instructed to kill anyone who
got in their way. One U Again, Rvil had failed
in what he thought was an ingenious plot to kill Verlin.
And this was far from the only downside for Herville
because in killing Rulin already a man with more than
(48:13):
two thousand followers, a man well known in Slake City,
a man with contacts on the police force and in
the governor's office, Herville had put himself on the radar
of some powerful enemies cops, the FBI, prosecutors, and people
like me journalists. A media led investigation into who Herbal was,
(48:35):
where he was, and just what he was up to
was just getting started. I thought, holy cow, have I
got a scoop on this, and on top of that
a righteous endeavor because this is a bad guy and
if you find someone who like Sitan, expose him. That's
coming up in episode four of Deliver Us from Herville.
(49:08):
Deliver Us from Herville is hosted by me Jesse Hyde
and written and reported by me, Leona Hamid and David Waters.
Production from Leona Hamid and David Waters, Sean Glenn and
Max O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Oyinka
are researchers. Marianna Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking
(49:32):
by Donya Suleman and Sona Avakian. Production management from Shari Houston,
Frankie Taylor and Charlotte wolf Austin Mitchell is our creative
director of production. Michae Lee Row is our managing editor.
Gavin Haynes is our head of development. Willard Foxton is
our creative director of Development. Sound design, mixing and scoring
(49:54):
by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas
Alexander 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
An Makaluso, or In Rosenbaum, Shelby Shankman and all the
(50:19):
team A U T A. For more from novel, visit
novel dot Audio
Ya novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and
content that some listeners might find distressing. Previously, on Deliver
(00:25):
Us from Herbal, Hervil thought that if he got rid
of Joel, he could just move in and take leadership
with Joel's people. Well, it didn't work, that's the problem.
After he had murdered Joel, it was always the fear
of them coming an attack in our town. We are
driving toward Los Molinas. They threw an attack. The attack
(00:52):
mostop the attacks were kids went and looked through the
window and at the moment he opened the cord and
he got shut into head in them. He killed my dad.
He should paid for it. And it doesn't matter if
he became possess or obsessed with evil spirit. He doesn't
(01:12):
change the fact that for me, Herbal was a beautiful soul.
I still love Herbal. Oh, yes, a lot deliberous. The
(01:33):
host of the following program is solely responsible for the
program's content. Once for a prophet name Ross, He's had
to roll wise for just one hoss religion he knows,
including UFOs, and in all his houses he's the boss.
Call him please, He's got the keys. Every Friday from
noon to one. He's the mighty, He's the strong, He's
(01:56):
the one. Ross Labara, noon to one Friday. Around the
same time as Irvil LeBaron was forming a cult, having
his own brother killed and attacking the town of Los
Milinos across the border in America, another LeBaron voice was
making waves with his own radio show, older brother to
(02:20):
Irville and Joel. Ross LeBaron opinionated, controversial, but not exactly
a smooth talker. Okay, this is Ross LeBaron, they home.
This will be the first program I done and operated
from the board. Although he certainly didn't lack in self confidence.
(02:41):
I know more about God, about the priesthood, about the prophecies,
about the future and how it operates than any man on.
And just like so many talk show hoss and podcasters today,
Ross was into some pretty out their ideas out when
Adam came here and when he lived in the Garden
(03:02):
of Eden, he had spaceships. You heard that right, spaceships
to take the faithful to Heaven. Space Ships were called
Chair of Them and the Flaming Sword. Ross LeBaron had
already started building these spaceships out in the Chihuahua Desert.
This was back when he lived in colonial LeBaron in
the fifties, but by the sixties he left that Mexican
(03:23):
town and moved his spaceship Operation I guess you could
call it to Utah. And while Joel and Herville were
starting out with those pamphlets to spread the message of
their dream of Zion, Ross saw the power of radio,
initially as a guest on other talk shows and then
with a program of his very own to connect him
(03:43):
with the masses. My therapy on miss program is too full, stale,
Martin is um like Christ will build the Law of Moses.
There is actually a lot I recognize when I or
Ross le Baron on the radio, all his references to
(04:03):
doctrine and covenants. I grew up with these terms too,
So listening in on the scratchy radio clips mixing mainstream
Mormon stuff with talk of rockets to outer space, it's
kind of funny. Funny. You're still when you get to
the show's calling segment, where Ross is often confronted by confused,
(04:24):
sometimes even angry listeners. Hello, uh am, I aunt, this
is John Salas. That's very good. You're good, go ahead, Yeah,
I just wanted to that. They're you know, makes me suggesting,
could you kind of you know, seems to could change
(04:47):
your flat with the behind because when you come on
it than you. But as funny as he sometimes sounds,
it would be foolish to laugh too hard at Ross
labar Arn, to not take him and his kind seriously,
because Ross le Baron and the shows he would make
(05:07):
guest appearances on were a kind of lightning rod for
certain kinds of listeners, often male, usually feeling isolated. They
can't understand why they don't have it better in life.
It's an audience hundreds of podcasters and YouTubers, cable news hosts,
and politicians cater to today this distinctive cocktail of anger
(05:32):
and confusion seething just below the surface, and a sort
of quiet desperation to believe in something where you're at
the center, where you have value and a role to play.
(05:53):
Among the listeners to Ross le Baron in the nineteen
sixties was a man named Lloyd Sullivan. He lived in Vincennes, Indiana.
In the photos I've seen of him, he's wearing thick
coke bottle glasses, dark hair, and a sort of shell
act pompadour. Lloyd Sullivan was of River people's stock, which
(06:15):
means his family was one of many that lived in
shanty boats up and down the Mississippi or Ohio River
Valley after the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties, drifting
looking for work on paper. Lloyd didn't have much going
for him, not that educated, not too smart, orphaned as
(06:36):
a child. Now in his thirties and divorced with a
couple of kids, had a grown son named Don Sullivan,
who followed him like a shadow. Lloyd Sullivan started out
in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,
the church I grew up in, but he started to
find that mainstream Mormon doctrine was too well mainstream, too dull,
(07:01):
so he moved on, initially to a far right group
called the John Birch Society, like a precursor to Q
and On Proud Boys, oath Keepers, et cetera. The society
believed their race made them part of the Chosen Few,
an army of American patriots rooting out the Commies and
(07:22):
restoring the US to its white Christian foundations. That depressingly
familiar rhetoric that echoes through much of today's America. Anyway,
Lloyd Sullivan got bored of that too, and so he
went back to Mormonism, but this time to the fundamentalist groups,
(07:42):
which by the late nineteen sixties had sprung up across
the American Southwest like weeds. But one stood out to Lloyd,
the one he heard about on the radio. Solaine Halt
and the blind will gather with me, and the children
of the kings will be guessed out. The prophecy says,
the streets of saw Lake wool running blood after they've
(08:03):
heard my message. Wait a minute, I imagine I'm thinking,
his ears pricking up while tooling around under a hood
in his garage. This isn't dull. They'll litter be wiped
off as the city literally. This is how Lloyd Sullivan
(08:25):
was pulled into the La Baron orbit. He heard ross
LeBaron in the sixties as a guest on an ultra
conservative radio show in Utah, and Ross LeBaron set him
on a path that would lead him, in just a
few years, right to the heart of Hervil's expanding crime empire.
(08:46):
His story is just one example of what that journey
could look like, but it's similar to so many who
ended up killing in the name of Hervil. LeBaron, raised
in the mainstream Mormon Church, then taken in by the
amis of a return to an old school style of Mormonism,
and then sucked in further by the draw of an
(09:07):
uncompromising leader. Lloyd and his shadow, Don Sullivan, moved down
to colonial LeBaron in seventy two. When Lloyd met Irva
le Baron, it didn't take long four days. In fact,
after arguing theology and the finer points of fundamentalist Mormon doctrine,
Lloyd realized he'd been wrong again. Ross wasn't the one
(09:33):
mighty and strong Herville was. A month later, Joel is dead.
Two years after that, Lloyd and Don Sullivan would be
instrumental in the massacre at Los Milinos. In fact, for
a while, Lloyd and Don Sullivan would become Irvill LeBaron's
(09:54):
most enthusiastic soldiers. What Herba was building with his cruits
he may have called a church, but it had quickly
morphed into something else. A crime family intermarried, so they
became intertwined with Merville's own branch of the Labarns family,
(10:16):
members whose ultimate loyalty would be to him. Within a generation,
his family tree would mushroom splinter multiply into what he
saw as the beginnings of a kingdom, something altogether different
than what had begun in colonial LeBaron. God's kingdom as
(10:38):
a kind of mafia, now bound to each other not
just by faith, but by blood, shaped by a theology
rooted mostly in vengeance. And for those who resisted, who
refused to bend the knee, well, they would face the
same consequences as Joel and the town of Los Milinos.
(10:59):
They would fill the full force of God's wrath. Delivered
by Hervil LeBaron's colt from the Team's at novel and
I Heart Radio. This is deliver us from Herbal I'm
(11:23):
jesse Hyde, Chapter three, Welcome to the Family. Dorothy Solomon
already was just six years old in nineteen when the
(11:45):
two men unexpectedly showed up at her Utah home. They
came in an old, beat up truck. They pulled into
our driveway. They drove too fast, is screeched to a stop.
The Labarns had arrived unannounced Merville with an older brother,
then the one who called himself the Elephant Strangler. This
(12:09):
was back when Rville was still signing up followers for
Joel's church and the La Barren brothers were on a
recruitment drive. We ran into hiding and I watched them
get out of the truck and slammed the doors and
yell anybody home. Dorothy's father was a man named Rulin Alred.
(12:30):
Like the la Barons, he was a polygamist. He had
seven wives and forty eight children, but just one legal wife, Myrtle.
Having just one legal wife is how polygamas avoided prosecution
still do. And it was my father's legal wife, Myrtle,
who met them and told them that Rulin wasn't there,
(12:54):
that they should go away and come back later, and
they said they weren't going to leave until they could
speak to him. The two La Baron brothers decided to
demonstrate just how mighty and strong they really were, and
they started doing push ups in the driveway. That's when
they had the stone spitting contest. They were peculiar. Dorothy
(13:18):
watched as the two men strutted around in front of
the house like two little bantie roosters. They moved with
a kind of redneck self assurance. They moved aggressively, not confidently,
but aggressively. That's why I associate it with redneck men.
(13:41):
There was a very specific reason why the la Barons
were at Dorothy's house that day and why they wanted
to speak to Dr. Alred. He wasn't just the head
of a huge family, but the head of a sort
of growing organization too. Around the same time that Joel
and Herville were built holding their churches, there were a
(14:02):
few large polygamous factions that existed in America, like the Kingston's,
the Short Creek Group, and the Alreds. In a way,
they were kinds of organized crime families too, not killers
like Rvila Barn's offshoot or even violent, but they all
lived in the underground, in the shadows. Their crime was polygamy,
(14:25):
which remember, was illegal. So these families they all sort
of did business with each other or helped each other out.
After all, if you believe in polygamy, it's not that
easy to find a wife. And so these families would
visit each other, intermarry, and some of these families had
built empires, amassed fortunes. Hervill coveted. The Kingston's, for example,
(14:51):
had a catoranche in Nevada, a coal mine in central Utah.
Eventually they would have pawn shops, their own grocery store,
a casino and Cali fournia, and trailer parks in Las Vegas.
From pretty much the start of colonial LeBaron Rvill had
been trying to get rich too. It wasn't just his
(15:12):
Mara Lago style plans for Los Melinos. His cult would
attempt other less glamorous business ventures over the years, from
mushroom farms to washing machine repair businesses. And then, of
course there were their criminal enterprises, from welfare fraud to
stealing cars, which it turned out they were quite good at.
(15:35):
Eventually they'd start stealing cars to order for clients in Mexico,
switched the plates and ship them south of the border.
And yet, for all Rville's efforts to grow his empire,
it paled in comparison to what the other large fundamentalist
communities were building. But Erville didn't want to emulate those
other big fundamentalist organizations. He wanted to consume them money.
(16:04):
After all, as far as he was concerned, he was
the one, mighty and strong, and these other families they
all owed him tithing. The Kingston's, the people in Short Creek,
the Allreds, especially the Alreds you see with them. It
(16:25):
was personal. Irville wanted what they had. He thought he
could get it, He thought he should get it. Shortly
before Dorothy was born, the all Reds had been one
of the first families settling in colonial a Baron. When
(16:48):
they arrived and they got down from the truck that
carried their belongings, they burst into tears because it was
a wasteland. There was a small garden, and otherwise it
was sage brush and rattlesnakes and blackwodow spiders and trunchs.
They might have been polygamist refugees, but they saw the
(17:11):
harsh reality of early life in colonial LeBaron. Less than
a year after they had got down from that truck,
the Alreds got back on it. They rejected the LeBaron
Zion took their chances living polygamy in the shadows back
in the US, and there they had prospered. In Utah,
(17:34):
ruling already established what would become one of the largest
Mormon fundamentalist sects to ever exist. Today, there's still one
of the biggest. If you've ever seen the TV show
Sister Wives, that family comes from the sect ruling started.
And what's more, Rulin already did this without ever needing
to use those grandiose titles Irville or his brothers did.
(17:58):
He never claimed to be a prophet. There are people
who hold him as a prophet, but I heard him
say on different occasions that he was not a replacement
for the leader. And there are many fundamentalists who have
commandeered lives, and commandeered brides, child brides, and done violence
(18:24):
to people, become tyrants over people in the name of
being the one mighty and strong. And I want it
clear that my father never aspired to that. Dorothy grew
up in a big gray house in the foothills of
a place in Utah called Bluff Bell. They had twenty
(18:46):
acres meadows and swamps and skiing hills, and it was
a beautiful place to grow up and all the playmates
you could ever want. Of course, with seven women broke
creating all at once. I had many, many siblings near
my age, and I loved them. The world Dorothy remembers
(19:09):
as a child in Utah was kind of the polar
opposite from the childhood that Stephanie Spencer endured. Stephanie, who
was regularly beaten and humiliated by her fundamentalist parents in
Colonia le Baron. Dorothy's childhood in Utah sounds pretty storybook,
devoid of the violence and fear. With so many kids around,
(19:32):
it was hard for Dorothy to find time with her father.
I used to go out to the barns with him
in the morning, because that was time I could spend
just with him. Nobody else wanted to milk, and my
mother would indulge me. She'd put on my sweater and
wash my face and send me out smiling, and he
(19:54):
helped me milk the cow. And you know, that was
kind of a theme. I wanted to be like my father.
I wanted to have that much respect and power, respect power.
Merville wanted that, and Rulin had it, the kind of
(20:17):
effortless stature Hervill could only dream of, could only covet.
My father was a reluctant leader. He wasn't proselyting, he
wasn't trying to increase his numbers. He was simply trying
to protect those who believed that he was there leader.
(20:38):
And he had a council of men advising him too.
He didn't try to lead by himself. Rulin was a
natural pathic doctor, a healer, a medicine man for the
new age, didn't do surgery, didn't prescribe medicine. It was
all natural homeopathic. He had a thriving actus, mostly fundamentalists
(21:02):
who avoided hospitals because hospitals asked too many personal questions.
That day, when Irville and Ben barged up to Dorothy's
home started doing push ups in the driveway, Rulin was
at his office. Rulin's wife, Myrtle, called him and said
the La Baron boys had showed up, and Rulin was alarmed.
(21:24):
My father came home from his office that day too,
had them off because he was worried about the safety
of his family. He could sense there was a darkness around.
He wrote about it in his journals that he had
disagreements with Therville, who felt strongly that he should be
in charge of not only the mainstream Church of Latter
(21:48):
day Saints, but the United States government. Of course, when
Joel was killed, then everybody's antennas sprang up. After Joel's
death in seventy two, Dorothy remembers her dad returning from Mexico,
where he had attended the funeral in Colonial LeBaron. Arriving home,
(22:12):
he told the family what he had learned. It was
really true, Joel le Baron had been murdered, and it
was Joel's own brother, Herbal, who was responsible. It wasn't
long after that that the alred started to receive chilling threats.
(22:34):
That's coming up after the break. About a month before
Dervil's followers carried out the massacre and Los Milinos, Herville
met with a man in a diner in Salt Lake City.
(22:56):
It was November of seventy four. The man belonged to
the Kingston's, or as they called themselves, the Davis County Coop,
one of those large fundamentalist groups I mentioned earlier. Herville
brag to him he was untouchable. You could try to
shoot him with a pistol, but the pistol wouldn't fire.
(23:17):
God protected him. Hervill also told him that within a
year he'd be the head of a separate nation which
would have power over the whole planet. To do that,
he had to cleanse the earth. He asked for a
meeting with the head of the Kingston Clan. The meeting
was set up and Rville told the Kingston's they owed
(23:38):
him tithing. In fact, all the fundamentalist groups did, the Kingston's,
the Alreds, the council of friends down his Short Creek.
He was the one mighty and strong, and he had
been for twelve years. For twelve years, he'd been asking
for tything, and they hadn't given it, And so Herbal
(24:00):
gave them a deadline. They had until January one, nine,
one year, basically to pay him a ten percent cut
from all their businesses, the cattle ranch, the pawn shops,
the coal mine, or as he put it, there would
be bloodshed. He'd burned their businesses down. Herval had come
(24:24):
as a man of God, but this felt more like
a mafia style shakedown, as they say in Mexico Plata Oploma,
silver or lead. Herville visited Short Creek and the Alreds
and gave them the same ultimatum, pay up or else.
The man was done waiting around. My father actually had
(24:48):
people come and try to protect him during these times
of threat. Dorothy Alred remembers the intimidation wasn't just escalating,
it was becau coming more direct. My mother came home
one night and saw printed in footprints on the deep snow,
(25:10):
we'll be back. This particular threat happened on December, a
few days after the Los Milinos attack. Just as word
of the massacre had started to spread. Now across the border.
Up in Utah, cars were seen prowling around the all
Red compound. Rocks were thrown at their home, and then
(25:34):
someone cut the electricity the phone ring. You think you
were very secure, don't you. There was a string of threats,
pamphlets left on the windshield of his car with handwritten
threats affixed to them, Threats that if he didn't repent
(25:55):
and follow the true prophet, he was going to die.
Up until the spring of seventy seven, these threats against
Rulin Allred had remained just that threats, no actual violence.
One reason for this might have been that Rville was
occupied with another target, his younger brother Virlin LeBaron, Virlin,
(26:21):
who was still head of Colonial LeBaron and the Church
of the Firstborn, the church Ervil had helped start with
his brother Joel. Since the Los Milinos massacre in seventy four,
when Rville had first tried and failed to have Virlin killed,
Merville's hatred for him had only grown with a venom
(26:41):
and passion that even startled some of Rvill's followers. Virlin
knew this, and from seventy four, he was living in hiding.
Herville continued to hunt him through seventy six and into
seventy seven. He attempted further hits, got cult members to
dress in disguise and patrol the streets of Mexican towns
(27:04):
where he thought Virlin might be holed up. They had
orders to shoot to kill on site, but these missions
had also ended in failure. By the spring of seventy seven,
Hervil's more zealous followers like Lloyd Sullivan, We're getting impatient.
Why wasn't this getting done? Lloyd wanted to know. Why
(27:28):
weren't there businesses growing faster. Why weren't they able to
take over these other fundamentalist clans to unite the entire
Mormon Church. Why wasn't their profit Hervill able to deliver.
On April, Herville called a military emergency meeting. He got
(27:52):
up and announced he had a plan to finally get
to Rlin. If they couldn't find him, they draw him
out into the open. His plan was to use a funeral,
the funeral of one of Rlin's close friends, someone who
had married two of Rlin's nieces. Ruling alread Rulin, then
(28:15):
Verlin hervill would take them both out one after the other.
Then maybe people would finally take him seriously pay that
tithing he felt they owed. Rulin's assassination was going to
be the spark that would start the fire. It would
be carried out by one of Gerville's most trusted followers,
(28:36):
from a bedrock family of his crime empire. This particular
family were called the Chinnas. The city of East Layton,
a little north of Salt Lake City, Utah, is surrounded
(28:59):
by pasture and open land in the winter, snow capped mountains.
It's peaceful, but also kind of boring in that way.
Most suburbs are sleepy, well ordered, unremarkable, both figuratively and literally,
more than a thousand miles away from the extremes of
the Chihuahua Desert and colonial a Baron, but it used
(29:23):
to share one key characteristic with that Mexican town. Almost
everyone who lived there was Mormon. This was the upbringing
of Glenn shinaf All right, well, Glenn, First off, thank you. Um.
I'm sitting in Glenn's living room on a cold December morning.
(29:44):
That dog a problem. He's got a couple of little
dogs that he's putting in a kennel off in the
kitchen to keep them from jumping up on me, not
of me. Glenn seventy nine is wearing blue coveralls, sturdy
black boots, thick glasses, blue collars, like all the uncles
I grew up with who worked construction. There's a picture
(30:06):
of Jesus on the wall, like the one my grandpa
had in his double wide trailer. It's all very familiar,
even Homie sitting with him, like we could be related.
Although Glenn and I are a few generations apart. His
upbringing was much more like mine than anything that happened
in colonial LeBaron. We're both products of the mainstream Mormon church.
(30:28):
In both our families, religion was front and center. It
was pretty well the only thing. My dad was worked
out at the Hill Air Fource base. My mom was
very religious. We went to church, went to all the activities,
family prayer, church, basketball games, campouts with the local congregation
(30:50):
up in the mountains Rockwellian. And then of course there
were Glenn's siblings, Mark the musician. Mark was a really
good piano player. Just bring a piano up and he
could just make it, saying younger brother Victor, who was
five years my junior. He was well built. I remember
I couldn't pick him up, and he wasn't fat, he
(31:12):
was just solid built little guy. His little sister, Lorna
age wise, I was closest to her, but she was
a pain in the but little sister to me. And
then there were the two babies of the family, Dwayne
and Rena. You know, I changed their diapers and I
maybe said that happened. There was another sibling to Jerry,
(31:35):
but he died young, aged just seven. Tragedies like this,
I'm not sure how parents ever recover. There were other
tensions in the Chinath family too. You see, Glenn's dad, Bud,
wasn't exactly a devout believer. Sure he went to church,
but he smoked, which is taboo among Mormons, and he
(31:57):
drank a lot. He filled the family room with car parts,
engine blocks, tools. I guess that's why for Glenn's mom, Thelma,
church became sort of a refuge. She was committed baking
a ham for a funeral, showing a quilt for Christmas.
The church became her family too, and so in nineteen
(32:20):
when her brother introduced her to two important looking believers
who were in town from Mexico. She invited them to
visit her home, and that's when the Labarns showed up
and things got pretty rough after that. You know, it's
been a long time since this all happened for you
(32:43):
recalling these memories talking about this, How do you feel
about that? I'm doing okay with it. I'm past the
point where it brings tears. The La Barons arrived in
Glenn's life during that period where Joel and Rville were
still operating as a united front before Rville pulled away
(33:05):
and started his own colt. The two brothers told the
family about the new community they were building down in Mexico.
They should come check it out for themselves. There was
space for the whole family. Joel was you know, I
could see he believed what he believed. I saw no
violence there at that point, and it was hard to
(33:29):
resist what he wanted to do because it was an
easy going, nice, decent guy. But whatever it was the
two men in suits were selling, Glenn wasn't buying. I
couldn't win in a debate or a discussion, but I
I just didn't buy their teachings. It was a confrontation
because they wanted me to think their way, and I
(33:51):
wasn't going to do it, So Glenn started avoiding the
house altogether during their visits, but in his absence, the
labar Ends were finding fertile ground. My mom converted first,
then my sister, oldest sister, this was Laura. She was
(34:12):
just seventeen when Erville arrived and aspiring actress and model, tall,
willowy and beautiful. One day, Laura told her mom she
wanted to marry Herville. Hervill already had three wives and
was a full nineteen years older than Laurna, but Thelma
had converted to and had no objections. Initially, they kept
(34:34):
this a secret from Glen's dad, but Laura told her
dad she was going to take a job at the
Grand Canyon for the summer. When she didn't come back
for school, Filma told him the truth. Their daughter had
married Hervil LeBaron and moved to Mexico, and then she
was gone. That's the last time I saw her ever. Yeah,
(35:00):
once Hervil's claws were into the family, he wasn't going
to stop at Lorna. Thelma wanted to go to Mexico too,
but Bud wasn't so sure, so Thelma moved into her
own room, contemplating divorce. Realizing what was at stake, Bud
quit drinking and smoking, started studying his scriptures, cleaned up
(35:21):
all his tools and engine parts in the front room,
and eventually Bud converted to They all did, only Glenn
held out. The whole family just up and moved. So
I'm at that point pretty well out on my own,
and it was tough on me. By nineteen sixty six,
(35:43):
all the Channaths minus Glenn, had relocated to Mexico to
join the Labeyreans. Their destination was Los Milinos. They thought
they were going to go out and save the world.
Herbal was their leader. He had convinced him that they
could go up say in the world, And they all
got on this ship. And as they went along, I
(36:05):
started thinking, and then it caught on fire. That's coming
up after the break. What Glenn Channath experienced losing his
(36:31):
entire family to the Labaron Colt was one personal tragedy
of many. As Erville built his crime family outward, converting
followers marrying their daughters who would then bear him children.
And because these were polygamous relationships, many wives having many children,
Herville was able to grow his followers at scale rather
(36:54):
than just one by one, and the Channaths would rise
to the highest ranks of his family. They'd become Ervill's
most beloved disciples. To use a word from scripture, mercenaries, assassins, concubines.
That would be the more crass but honestly more accurate
way to put it. Herville had plans for all of them.
(37:18):
Thelma had brains and she was not afraid to speak
her mind. She would become one of Ervill's chief strategists.
Bud had his uses too handy, dependable, but his greatest
gift to Rvill were his kids. After becoming Ervill's wife,
(37:39):
Laura would bear him eight children. Her brother Victor would
become the family's money man, kind of like the infamous
mob accountant Meyer Landski. Rvill would eventually name him Minister
of Finance. Mark, the gifted musician who could have looked
at the kid with a mop of black hair, who
(37:59):
loved one of the corniest bands of all time, the Monkeys,
and seen a straight killer. No one back in East
Layton saw that, but the things Mark would end up
doing with a gun cold blooded. Herville saw that Mark
would become one of the killers of the Los Milinos massacre,
(38:22):
and that would be just the start. Dwayne would also
prove to be deadly with a gun. At Los Milinos.
He had been the attacker, unmasked by his former almost
girlfriend before he drove around the town, burning his neighbor's
houses and shooting into their homes. But of all the Chinas,
none would prove more valuable and for a time more
(38:44):
loved than Glenn's youngest sister, Rena. She too would marry Herville,
bear him children, and like her brothers, she had been
at the Los Milinos attack, watching from the sidelines. But
on April nineteen seventy seven, when Herville held that military
(39:06):
emergency meeting, the one where he outlined his audacious plan
for double murder, first of Rulin Alread, then his own
brother Verlin. At the funeral, it was Rena's turn to
take center stage. She had been selected to kill for Herville,
a murder that set off a chain of events altering
the path of Rvil's Colt forever. On the morning of
(39:36):
May nineteen seventy seven, the hit team arrived in the
Salt Lake Valley, twenty miles south of there. In Bluff Dell.
Dorothy was arriving at her family's compound, I was alarmed
to see that in front of the White House, which
was the original property my father had acquired, there were
(39:56):
these big gouges in the front lawn. They looked like grapes.
With the dirt pile to the side, Dorothy could see
that the barn was being torn down. Maybe the gouges
had something to do with that. Still, she felt unsettled.
And then she heard something tapping on her car window.
(40:19):
And I looked, and I thought I saw my grandmother,
who had lived on that compound with us prior to
her death, and she used to reach through with her
cane and tap on my mother's bedroom window when she
needed help. Well, she was tapping on my window urgently,
(40:40):
and I thought I could hear it. I looked, and
there was nothing there. And then I turned my attention
back and I heard the tapping again. It was the
same experience. And my little girl said ghosts. I didn't
even know she knew that word, and that gave me chill,
(41:01):
and I said, got honey, and she nodded very seriously,
and I shivered. It just kind of stayed with me.
As we left, I looked at those gouged out holes
that looked like graves. Dorothy was due to meet her
(41:23):
dad that day, but she had an invitation to meet
up with a friend, so she had postponed. On her way,
she passed by her father's doctor's office. As we passed
my father's office, I saw two women out in front
when it was in a blue parka, and I got
those chills again. Around this time, two of Hervil's followers,
(41:47):
Ramona Marston and Riena Schnas. We're getting decked out in
strikingly similar outfits. Rena in a blue parka from a
thrift store they shopped at earlier that morning to buy disguises.
They both wore white shirts, dark pants, curly wigs, wire
framed glasses with no lenses. Dorothy drove on continued away
(42:11):
from the city, eventually meeting up with her friend at
a place called the Mountain Dell golf Course. It was
a beautiful day up at Mountain Dell. We came out
about six o'clock, and because we were going down the mountain,
my brother had the radio on and I couldn't hear
what he was saying, and so I leaned forward and said,
(42:33):
will you turn that radio down? Or off, because I
can't hear you. Otherwise I would have heard the news announcement.
We stopped to get food for our children, who were
being babysat at my house. I called to ask what
everyone wanted. My daughter said, Mama, Grandma wants you to
(42:58):
call her right now. And I said, don't you want
something to eat? And she said, Mamma, called grandma right now.
And so I called my mother and she said, Honey,
your dad he's spent shot. And I said, as he, dad,
(43:22):
and she said, yes, she's dead. The all Red family
gathered that night and began to piece together the details
of what happened. One of Rulin's wives had actually been
there at the time of the killing, sitting in the
waiting room. She had witnessed the whole thing. She'd actually
(43:44):
had the murder's weapon pointed at her because she stepped
in the way to try to protect him. At fourte pm,
two women entered Dr. Alred's waiting room, rena hold caliber
from her bulky blue park and fired two shots straight
(44:05):
at the doctor at point blank range. Those were her
orders to destroy the false prophets phase Herville had ordered
the killers to shoot his face, a kind of twisted
additional vengeance against the man he saw as his rival.
My father wasn't a false prophet. He was just a
(44:26):
good man. He was a doctor, and he was kind
and he was a good father. So you know, that's
good that his face wasn't destroyed, but he was still gone.
(44:49):
Just like Naoma Stubbs fearing the bombs, fire and awaiting
gunshots in Colonial LeBaron, Dorothy hadn't just worried about the
terror she was now experiencing. It was like she'd seen
it coming. It feels kind of strange to say that
out loud, but this is the kind of thing people
(45:11):
have told me time after time while reporting the story.
I knew that it was coming, but it didn't make
it any easier. And I was really sorry that I
hadn't been there. And for me, it was if I
(45:31):
kept my appointment, maybe I could have faced her down.
Maybe I could have seized the weapon or talked to her,
spoken to her about what she was doing. Of course,
I probably would have been killed myself. There's that part too,
But I felt a lot of guilt about it not
(45:52):
being there to protect him. The killing was just a prelude,
a way to lure Virlin out into the open. And
it had worked, because now three days after the doctor
ruling all read murder, the funeral was being held. It
(46:17):
was held at Bingham High School and their enormous auditorium.
It was the largest personal funeral held in this state
of Utah, you know, not of a so called public figure,
as Hervil had prophesied. Virlin had left his hiding place
(46:38):
and traveled into Utah. And here he was taking his
seat with all the other mourners in the auditorium. Meanwhile,
waiting across the street in vehicles or three men with
sub automatic rifles with banana eclipse taped together. They're capable
(47:00):
of spewing twenty rounds within seconds. They were prepared to
go in and kill Virlin LeBaron. But this is where
Herbal's plan unraveled because as followers waiting outside in the car,
as the crowds arrived, including Don Sullivan, the son of Lloyd,
(47:22):
and a man named Eddie Marston, were suddenly having second thoughts.
They got scared when they saw the police and the
media and the crowds, and they decided to risk vill
rather than risk the police, and they left for now
(47:50):
another massacre had been avoided. A great many people would
have died because they were instructed to kill anyone who
got in their way. One U Again, Rvil had failed
in what he thought was an ingenious plot to kill Verlin.
And this was far from the only downside for Herville
because in killing Rulin already a man with more than
(48:13):
two thousand followers, a man well known in Slake City,
a man with contacts on the police force and in
the governor's office, Herville had put himself on the radar
of some powerful enemies cops, the FBI, prosecutors, and people
like me journalists. A media led investigation into who Herbal was,
(48:35):
where he was, and just what he was up to
was just getting started. I thought, holy cow, have I
got a scoop on this, and on top of that
a righteous endeavor because this is a bad guy and
if you find someone who like Sitan, expose him. That's
coming up in episode four of Deliver Us from Herville.
(49:08):
Deliver Us from Herville is hosted by me Jesse Hyde
and written and reported by me, Leona Hamid and David Waters.
Production from Leona Hamid and David Waters, Sean Glenn and
Max O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Oyinka
are researchers. Marianna Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking
(49:32):
by Donya Suleman and Sona Avakian. Production management from Shari Houston,
Frankie Taylor and Charlotte wolf Austin Mitchell is our creative
director of production. Michae Lee Row is our managing editor.
Gavin Haynes is our head of development. Willard Foxton is
our creative director of Development. Sound design, mixing and scoring
(49:54):
by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas
Alexander 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
An Makaluso, or In Rosenbaum, Shelby Shankman and all the
(50:19):
team A U T A. For more from novel, visit
novel dot Audio
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