Sins of the Deacon

There is a barn in Kirtland, Ohio, that most people drive past without a second glance. It sits back from the road, unremarkable, the kind of structure that dots the rural landscape of Lake County like punctuation in a sentence nobody reads. But in January of 1990, investigators in latex gloves and heavy coats descended on that barn and began, slowly and with great care, to dig. What they found in the cold earth beneath it would become one of the most disturbing criminal cases in Ohio history — not merely for the brutality of what had been done, but for the reason it had been done at all. Five members of a single family had been murdered there, in the spring of the previous year, by a man who told them — who told everyone — that he spoke directly to God.

Jeffrey Lundgren had been speaking for a long time by then. And for a long time, people had been listening.

Dennis Avery was forty-nine years old when he died. He had spent much of his adult life searching for something larger than himself, the way many good people do — through faith, through community, through the particular comfort of belonging to something that felt true and permanent. He had grown up in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a faith tradition distinct from the Utah-based Mormon church, and it was through that community that he had met and married Cheryl Avery, a warm and quietly devoted woman who shared his spiritual inclinations. They built a life in the Midwest, moving around as Dennis pursued work, never quite settling but always finding their footing in the church communities wherever they landed. By the late 1980s they had three daughters: Trina, fifteen; Rebecca, thirteen; and Karen, seven. People who knew the family described them as gentle, perhaps a little naive, the kind of people whose trust in others was one of their defining qualities. Cheryl was remembered as deeply caring, devoted to her children, a woman who wore her faith openly and without pretension. Dennis could be awkward, socially, and struggled at times with finances and employment, but those who knew him spoke of his sincerity. He wanted, more than anything, to be part of something meaningful.

That longing led him, and his family, to Kirtland.

Jeffrey Lundgren had arrived in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1984, along with his wife Alice and their children, ostensibly to serve as a tour guide at the Kirtland Temple, a historic RLDS site of considerable religious significance. But Lundgren had larger ambitions than tour guiding. Physically imposing, charismatic in a particular way that combined authority with intimacy, he had a gift for biblical interpretation that could be, by the accounts of those who witnessed it, genuinely compelling. He began holding study sessions at his home. He began drawing followers. He preached a version of scripture that was highly personalized, increasingly authoritarian, and gradually, systematically, centered on himself — his own prophetic gifts, his own special relationship with the divine.

The Averys came into Lundgren's orbit in the mid-1980s and moved to Kirtland in 1987 to be closer to the group that had gathered around him. Prosecutors would later argue, and the evidence extensively documented, that life within this group was not what it appeared from the outside. Lundgren controlled nearly every aspect of his followers' existences — their finances, their relationships, their spiritual self-worth. He demanded loyalty that brooked no questioning. Those who displeased him were subjected to what his followers later described as ritual humiliation and psychological pressure. Lundgren taught that he, and he alone, could determine a person's standing before God.

Dennis and Cheryl Avery did not always fare well in those assessments. Court records and the subsequent accounts of former cult members paint a picture of a family that was struggling financially, that had difficulty making the monetary contributions Lundgren expected, and that was — in the language Lundgren used — found spiritually lacking. Dennis in particular seemed unable to satisfy whatever standard Lundgren continually moved just out of reach. It is a portrait that is painful to consider: a man earnestly seeking spiritual elevation, unaware that the person judging him had already decided how his story would end.

By the winter of 1988 into 1989, Lundgren had begun telling his inner circle — the small group of the most devoted followers who lived communally on a farm property in Kirtland — that a great event was approaching. He spoke of leading a group of the faithful to take the Kirtland Temple by force, of a spiritual cleansing, of a new era. The details shifted and evolved, as such prophecies tend to do. But one element became increasingly fixed in his preaching: before any of this could happen, a sacrifice would be required. The Averys, Lundgren declared, were not spiritually worthy to continue with the group. They were, in the language he used, a "stumbling block."

The murders took place over the course of one evening in April of 1989 — April 17th, a Monday. What the evidence at trial established, drawn from the testimony of former cult members who were present on the property that night, was a sequence of events that was methodical and deliberate. The Avery family had been told they would be participating in a special ceremony. They were taken, one by one, beginning with Dennis, then Cheryl, then the three daughters, into a pit that Lundgren's followers had dug in the barn in the days prior. Each was bound. Each was killed by gunfire. The jury found Jeffrey Lundgren had orchestrated and participated in these killings. His followers, to varying degrees, had carried them out or assisted in their concealment. The bodies were buried in the pit, covered over, and the barn returned to its ordinary appearance.

The group left Kirtland shortly afterward, moving first to West Virginia and then to Missouri and eventually to California, where Lundgren continued to hold sway over the remaining members of the group, continuing his prophecies, continuing to present himself as a man of divine authority. For nearly nine months, the Avery family simply — vanished. People who had known them peripherally assumed they had moved on, as the family had done before. The RLDS church had already disfellowshipped Lundgren by this point, but the formal severing of that relationship did nothing to dissolve the group he had built around himself.

The unraveling began, as it often does, through a person who could no longer carry the weight of what they knew. In late 1989, a former member of the group contacted law enforcement. The accounts of who made first contact and the precise sequence vary somewhat across different reporting, but what is documented is that by December of 1989, federal authorities, working in conjunction with local law enforcement, had taken Jeffrey Lundgren into custody in California on federal weapons charges, and that information provided by former cult members had directed investigators to the barn on the Kirtland farm. On January 3rd, 1990, a search of the barn property led to the discovery of the buried remains of all five members of the Avery family.

The investigation that had proceeded in the months prior was built through painstaking work. The FBI had become involved after Lundgren's flight across state lines, and agents worked alongside Ohio authorities to assemble accounts from the former group members, many of whom were themselves facing potential criminal exposure. Court records reflect that multiple individuals who had lived on the farm provided testimony about what they had witnessed or participated in, and those accounts — corroborated by the physical evidence recovered from the barn — formed the backbone of the prosecution's case. The forensic evidence recovered from the site confirmed the manner and approximate timing of the deaths, consistent with what the witnesses had described.

Jeffrey Lundgren was returned to Ohio to face charges. A total of fifteen individuals connected to the group were ultimately charged with crimes in connection with the Avery murders, including Lundgren's wife Alice and his son Damon. The charges against others ranged from complicity to aggravated murder. But it was Jeffrey Lundgren — as the person prosecutors argued had conceived, ordered, and directed the killings — who faced the most severe charges: five counts of aggravated murder, with death penalty specifications.

His trial began in August of 1990. The proceedings lasted several weeks. Prosecutors argued, methodically and with considerable evidentiary support, that Lundgren had used his position of spiritual authority to manipulate a group of followers into complicity in premeditated murder, and that he had personally participated in killing the five members of the Avery family. The testimony of former cult members was central — witnesses who had been present on the farm that night, who described what had occurred in that barn, who recounted Lundgren's instructions and declarations in the days and weeks leading up to the killings. Former followers described a climate of total psychological control, of genuine fear, of the belief — cultivated deliberately by Lundgren — that to question him was to risk not just social exclusion but divine punishment.

Lundgren's defense argued, among other things, questions of culpability and of the degree to which his own mental state or religious beliefs bore on the charges. The jury did not find these arguments persuasive. After deliberating, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all five counts of aggravated murder. In the penalty phase, the same jury recommended death. Lake County Common Pleas Court Judge Paul Mitrovich sentenced Jeffrey Lundgren to death — five times over, one for each member of the Avery family.

The appeals process that followed stretched across the better part of sixteen years. Lundgren's legal team raised numerous issues over the course of those appeals, challenging aspects of his trial, his sentencing, and the constitutionality of his execution. The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions and sentences. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld them. Federal habeas corpus petitions were filed and denied. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his case. Each avenue of appeal was pursued and, ultimately, exhausted. Through all of it, Lundgren maintained, in various ways and at various moments, that he had acted on divine instruction — a claim that courts at every level evaluated and found without legal merit.

On October 24th, 2006, Jeffrey Lundgren was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. He was sixty-six years old. In the period preceding his execution, he gave interviews in which he expressed, by some accounts, a degree of remorse — though observers noted that his statements often retained the particular quality of a man who had spent decades framing every event in his life as spiritually significant, as part of a larger narrative in which he remained, even at the end, the central figure. He was the first person executed in Ohio for the murder of an entire family.

The others who faced charges in connection with the Avery murders received varying outcomes. Alice Lundgren, who had knowledge of the planned killings, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; she was paroled in 2012 after serving more than two decades. Damon Lundgren was convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to 120 years in prison. Other members of the group received sentences that reflected their varying degrees of participation and cooperation with prosecutors. Several who provided testimony against Lundgren received lesser sentences or, in some cases, had charges reduced in exchange for their cooperation.

The Kirtland farm property is no longer what it was. Time and distance have done their work on the physical place, as they do on all places where terrible things have happened. The barn is gone. The Avery family — Dennis and Cheryl, Trina, Rebecca, and Karen — are buried together in a cemetery in Independence, Missouri, which had been their original home ground, the place the family had come from before their search for meaning led them to Ohio and to a man who spoke in the language of God while doing something very different in his heart.

What lingers, when you sit with this case, is not the particular details of what Jeffrey Lundgren did, disturbing as they are. What lingers is the quieter, harder question of how it happened — how a family of five, decent people seeking community and faith, came to be in that barn at all. The former cult members who testified at trial described a process that was gradual, that exploited genuine spiritual longing, that used the vocabulary of the sacred to achieve ends that were entirely human and entirely dark. The control Lundgren exercised was built slowly, over years, through small increments — a reinterpretation of a scripture here, a test of loyalty there, the slow normalization of his own authority as something beyond question. By the time the Averys were declared spiritually unworthy by the man they had trusted with their souls, they may not have had the psychological framework left to recognize what that declaration actually meant.

That is not a comforting thought. It was not meant to be. It is, however, an honest one. The capacity of human beings to invest trust in those who claim special access to the divine is deep and old, and it has been exploited throughout human history by people who understand that capacity and know how to use it. Jeffrey Lundgren understood it very well. What made him dangerous was not that he was incomprehensible. What made him dangerous was that, to the people around him, for a long time, he made perfect sense.

The five members of the Avery family deserved better from the world than they received. They deserved, at the very least, to be remembered as people — as Dennis's quiet sincerity, Cheryl's warmth, three young daughters with their whole lives still unwritten. The trial and its outcome and the long machinery of justice that followed restored something, but not everything. It never does. What it restored was the formal record: five lives, five counts, five verdicts, and one final accounting that came, at last, on an October morning in Lucasville, sixteen years after the night in that barn when Jeffrey Lundgren substituted his own judgment for the divine one he claimed to represent, and five innocent people paid the price for it.