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Prophet of Death: The Mormon Blood-Atonement Killings
Prophet of Death The Mormon BloodAtonement Killings Author:Pete Earley The story of cult murderer Jeffrey Don Lundgren-a husband, a father, a preacher, and a killer-mesmerized the American Middle West for more than a year. It is a tale of unspeakable evil, of hidden lusts, sexual slavery, of friend turned against friend, husband against wife against child, of demonic, homicidal urges played out within the white cla... more »pboard walls of a rural church.
For two hundred thousand devout adherents, the spiritual center of world Mormonism is not Salt Lake City but Independence, Missouri. It was there that Lundgren first began preaching the bizarre beliefs that led him in 1984 to Kirtland, Ohio, the small town where Joseph Smith, Jr. established his ministry and built the first Morman temple.
In Smith's antique temple, which still attracts pilgrims from around the world, Lundgren gathered a circle of followers who were attracted to his knowledge, his charismatic oratory, and his defiance of the reform movement then engulfing their faith.
Five years later, Lundgren and his followers were gone, first from the ranks of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, then from the community of Kirtland, Ohio, and into the wild backcountry of West Virginia.
But on a rainy morning in January of 1989, a party of Kirtland police officers discovered Jeffrey Don Lundgren's terrible legacy: the bodies of the Avery family, husband and wife and three young children, shot at point blank range and hastily buried under the dirt floor of an abandoned barn.
Why did Jeffrey Don Lundgren orchestrate the murder of his best friends and their children? How had Lundgren compielled such homicidal loyalty from his congregants? What evidence provoked the FBI to raid Lundgren's home on the day after the murder...though they did not actually detect the crime until at least six months later?
Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interview material and trial transcripts, Propher of Death reaches behind the well-reported headlines in this case to reveal the shocking innermost secrets of Jeffrey Don Lundgren, his immediate family and followers, and the almost equally strange world of the schismatic Mormon sect from which he sprang.« less