Nineteen | POLYGAMISTS IN THE NEWS
During the decades since the Short Creek Raid, many changes have occurred within Mormonism. Today the church basks in the respect and admiration it so strongly desired at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its international expansion has been phenomenal. The racial tensions of the late 1960s and early 1970s caused by the church’s refusal to allow blacks the priesthood quickly dissipated after church president Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 announcement that all worthy males, regardless of race, could henceforth be ordained into the Mormon priesthood.
Despite dramatic shifts in social programs and a new world-wide emphasis, including proselytizing in areas where polygamy is an accepted tradition, the church still officially opposes the practice. A 1974 pronouncement of Kimball warned against “the so-called polygamy cults which would lead you astray. Remember the Lord brought an end to this program many decades ago through a prophet who proclaimed the revelation to the world. People are abroad who will deceive you and bring you much sorrow and remorse. Have nothing to do with those who would lead you astray. It is wrong and sinful to ignore the Lord when he speaks. He has spoken—strongly and conclusively” (Conference Reports, Oct. 1974, 5).1
Though some Mormons would take issue with President Kimball’s historical interpretation of the Manifesto, few could successfully untangle the complicated maze of individuals and doctrines supporting the “polygamy cults.” But such a study is, in fact, essential to gain an understanding of modern polygamy. The first successful Fundamentalist group was organized in 1929 when Lorin C. Woolley, claiming direct authority from President John Taylor, ordained J. Leslie Broadbent, John Y. Barlow, Joseph W. Musser, and Charles F. Zitting “high priest-apostles” to comprise the “Council of Friends.” When Woolley died on 19 September 1934, Broadbent became the presiding official. Following his death the next year, John Y. Barlow, the senior member of the council, assumed the leadership position. Joseph W. Musser took over after Barlow’s death on 29 December 1949.
During Musser’s administration a few small independent groups broke away, but in 1951 a major schism occurred in the Fundamentalist organization, a division that resulted in the two major groups that have survived to the present. In early 1949 Musser suffered the first of a series of strokes which eventually resulted in his death on 29 March 1954. These health problems compromised his leadership. The council reached a crisis on 18 September 1951 when Musser ordained Rulon C. Allred as a high priest-apostle and appointed him his “second Elder.” Objections were raised to Allred’s ordination as well as to the ordination of a Mexican Indian, Margarito Bautista. When the council refused to accept Musser’s actions, declaring him mentally incompetent, he dissolved the council and organized a new one with Allred second in seniority.
Most lay members continued to support the original council, though the group had difficulty retaining a leader. Charles F. Zitting, the senior member of the council, died only four months after Musser’s passing. The next two men in line of seniority, LeGrand Woolley and Louis A. Kelsch, had not had their “high priest-apostleship” confirmed and therefore declined the leadership position. LeRoy Johnson of Short Creek finally agreed to assume the office, which he held until his 1987 death when he was succeeded by Rulon T. Jeffs, a Sandy, Utah, accountant. Rulon C. Allred maintained leadership in the second group, known as the Apostolic United Brethren, until his 1977 murder, after which his brother Owen assumed the position.
Prior to the formation of the Fundamentalist movement by Lorin C. Woolley, there were several small, loosely-knit polygamous groups in Utah. The first of these, organized in the early 1900s by Josiah Hickman, met with little success.2 Another was begun by John Tanner Clark, excommunicated in Provo, Utah, on 18 May 1905 for circulating letters declaring the Woodruff Manifesto to be a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” Clark claimed to receive revelations and on one occasion reported that a “voice from heaven [told] him that he was the most literal descendant of Jesus Christ living on the earth.” In addition, members of his organization put Clark forth as the “one mighty and strong” mentioned in section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Joseph Musser, a member of the short-lived group, assisted Clark in publishing a booklet entitled, “The One Mighty and Strong.”
A third relatively obscure group was led by Nathaniel Baldwin, an inventor who claimed during World War I to have received a revelation directing him to build a radio set superior to anything on the market. He eventually constructed a factory in Salt Lake City and advocated polygamy among his employees. The company rapidly expanded until Baldwin encountered difficulties with the law, after which the group gradually disbanded.
Moses Gudmundsen, a violin teacher at Brigham Young University, joined a polygamist group of approximately 120 faithful in the 1920s. Eventually assuming the leadership of the group, Gudmundsen convinced sixty members, including a body of “Springville Separatists,” to establish headquarters on a dry farm in western Utah, near Eureka. The group, claiming to be the chosen people of God, established a cooperative order. Gudmundsen grew a long white beard and wore a white robe to minister to his people.
One morning Gudmundsen was observed leaving the residence of May Holtz, who was married to another man. When confronted, Gudmundsen announced a revelation regarding “true wives” or “spiritual wives.” According to Gudmundsen’s revelation, which bore remarkable similarities to the spiritual wifery practices of Joseph Smith’s early New York contemporaries, a married person often found in another mate his or her social, intellectual, and spiritual equal. If such a spiritual mate were married to another, as May Holtz was, Gudmundsen encouraged the practice of “wife sacrifice.” Mr. Holtz went along with the action. Mormon church leaders, discovering the group’s activities, were less generous. In 1921 five members of the colony were excommunicated and seven more disfellowshipped. Shortly thereafter civil authorities made an investigation of the community. Though no charges were filed, the group disbanded and Gudmundsen drifted to California.
A more prominent Fundamentalist group—one still in existence—is the Davis County Cooperative Society. In 1935 Elden Kingston, who claimed to have been Leslie Broadbent’s “second elder,” organized the co-op after his claims to leadership in the primary Fundamentalist group were not recognized. Kingston’s group, with more than five hundred members, has steadily evolved financially until its assets are estimated at more than $50 million (Bradlee and Van Atta 1981, 167). Ironically, the members of this group eschew wealth. Initially male adherents wore only blue coveralls with a string tied around the waist. Women, to show their renunciation of the world and its emphasis on acquiring wealth, wore plain blue dresses with no pockets in which to put possessions. This attire was later abandoned for more modern clothing.
Today the Kingston community, described by a Salt Lake County sheriff’s lieutenant as “a very close-knit, impregnable polygamist group,” has expanded its commercial interests beyond Davis County (ibid.). The co-op presently owns over thirty businesses in Utah, as well as several farms, a 300-acre dairy farm in Woods Cross, a thousand-acre farm in Tetonia, Idaho, and a large cattle ranch in Emery County in central Utah. Their largest operation is a coal mine in Huntington Canyon, Utah. Though group leaders claim today that they no longer practice polygamy, numerous co-op members living around the Huntington Canyon mine were excommunicated during the early 1960s on grounds of polygamous cohabitation (Hilton 1965, 40-41).
Recently the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times has received more notoriety than any other Fundamentalist group. This organization was incorporated in Salt Lake City on 21 September 1955 by three brothers: Joel, Ross, and Floren LeBaron. Unlike most other Fundamentalist factions, the Church of the Firstborn claims no authority from Lorin C. Woolley. Rather, they make the claim that Joseph Smith secretly passed on the presidency of the High Priesthood, or the Right of the Firstborn Sceptre in Israel, to his close friend Benjamin F. Johnson in Nauvoo, Illinois. Johnson in turn supposedly conferred this authority on his grandson, Alma Dayer LeBaron. As soon as his boys “could understand things,” the elder LeBaron began to tell his sons about Benjamin F. Johnson. He told them that in Salt Lake City in the 1920s the angelic form of Johnson appeared to him and told him of the mission he was to perform. LeBaron promised one day to pass the “authority” or “mantle of Joseph Smith” on to the most worthy of his sons.
Despite LeBaron’s 1924 excommunication for polygamy, his seven sons remained Mormons while growing up in Colonia Juarez, Mexico. But their father’s teachings had taken hold. Benjamin, the oldest, claimed in 1933 that his father had given him the “mantle.” Within two years he began proclaiming that he was the “One Mighty and Strong” who would “set the house of god in order” and reconcile the Mormon church with the Fundamentalists. Ben’s strongest supporters were his brothers Ervil and Alma. But those close to the oldest LeBaron son noticed episodes of irrational behavior. At inappropriate times he would let out a loud roar to prove he was the “Lion of Israel.” On one occasion he stretched out in the busy Salt Lake City intersection of 33rd South and State street where he held up traffic for half an hour doing two hundred pushups. “See,” he said to the bewildered police officer who came to untangle the traffic, “nobody else can do that many. That proves I’m the One Mighty and Strong” (Van Atta 1977).
When Ben was eventually committed to the Utah State Mental Hospital in 1953, even his brothers, who had been excommunicated in 1944, no longer believed his claims. The younger LeBaron boys had by this time established a communal society on their ranch under the direction of Margarito Bautista, the Mexican leader of Rulon Allred’s group. But friction developed between the two groups. On a trip to Salt Lake City in 1955, Joel and Floren affirmed their continued support of Allred’s group. Afterwards, however, they, along with their brother Ross, filed incorporation papers for their own organization. Bickering broke out at once among the LeBarons. Ross claimed it was his idea to incorporate and that Joel had agreed that he would lead the organization “until the coming of the One Mighty and Strong.” When Joel announced that he was the “One Mighty and Strong,” Ross broke away and formed his own Church of the Firstborn.
When Joel and Floren returned to Mexico they were able to convert Ervil and Alma as well as their mother. Following years of missionary work under Ervil’s direction, the group claimed a membership of more than five hundred people. The most important influx to the organization outside the LeBaron family was the 1958 conversion of a number of Mormon missionaries in France. William Tucker, a counselor to the French mission president, was the ringleader of the group. Having read Fundamentalist literature prior to his mission, he apparently became converted to some of their views, particularly those on priesthood, and began secretly spreading the teachings to other missionaries.
When Tucker’s former missionary companion David T. Shore finished his mission and returned to Utah in January 1958, he obtained a copy of Ervil LeBaron’s “Priesthood Expounded” and sent it to Tucker. With his influence among other missionaries, Tucker gathered about him a small core of sympathizers, including J. Bruce Wakeham, Stephen M. Silver, Daniel Jordan, Ronald M. Jarvis, and Marilyn Lamborn. Mission president Milton Christensen discovered the activities of his charges and arranged to have Tucker, Silver, and Wakeham interviewed by Mormon apostles in Europe for the dedication of the London Temple on 8 September 1958. All other missionaries in France were closely questioned about their beliefs. Ultimately nine French missionaries were excommunicated and sent home: Tucker, Wakeham, Silver, Jordan, Lamborn, Neil Poulsen, Loftin N. Harvey, June Abbott, and Nancy Fulk. In addition, missionaries Ron Jarvis, Harvey Harper, and Marlene Wessel returned on their own without being excommunicated.
Seven of the former missionaries, four elders and three sisters, joined the LeBaron movement in Mexico and never returned to the LDS church. Tucker (who died in 1967), Silver, Jordan (who was murdered 1987), and Wakeham served as apostles in the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times. Marilyn Lamborn and Nancy Fulk married Tucker, and June Abbott married Wakeham. Shore also joined his former missionary friends in Mexico but later became disillusioned and rediscovered his faith in the LDS church, as did Harvey, Poulsen, Jarvis, Harper, and Wessel (Mehr 1988, 27-45).
Members of the “French Group,” while dynamic proselyters for the LeBaron—dominated Church of the Firstborn, eventually left the movement. The LeBarons continued to attract believers, however. Much of the success of the Church of the Firstborn can be attributed to Joel LeBaron. Followers and family members described him as “Christ-like.” But Ervil was the unofficial church spokesman and authored most of the church’s literature, which stressed such principles as the concept of two grand heads of the priesthood, priesthood authority, the Adam-God doctrine, and the theory that Joseph Smith was the Holy Ghost. The group also claimed supremacy over other Fundamentalist organizations, which merely prepared one for membership in the higher organization. Joel eventually came to view the unstable Ervil as a threat to the organization and cast him out of the church. Ervil, in return, said that Joel’s action stripped Firstborn leaders of their authority. The dispute escalated to bloodshed. In August 1972, on Ervil’s instruction, Joel was shot to death. Ross reported from Salt Lake that the action boiled “down to a fight over the birthright, just like in the Bible” (Van Atta 1977).
Ervil pursued that birthright with a passion. In the first half of 1975 five persons associated with LeBaron and his ragtag band of followers were killed. Several others narrowly escaped death. The first known act of violence during this period occurred at Los Molinos, Mexico, a small hamlet founded by Joel LeBaron some years earlier. Ervil’s “Lambs of God,” as they liked to be called, led a commando-like night raid on the community, fire-bombing homes and gunning down residents. Fifteen people were wounded; two men died. When witnesses appeared to testify about Ervil’s involvement in the raid, they were fired at with a shotgun while waiting outside the courtroom in Ensenada.
A few days after the Los Molinos incident, Neomi Zarate, wife of one of Ervil’s followers, disappeared and was presumed to have been killed on Ervil’s orders. Robert Simons, an eccentric polygamist in Grantsville, Utah, was reported missing after last being seen with some of Ervil’s henchmen.3 Seven-foot-tall “Lamb of God” defector Dean Vest was shot to death in National City, California, by Vonda White, one of Ervil’s plural wives.4
Ervil, convicted of complicity in Joel’s 1972 murder, served only eight months of his twelve-year sentence before being released by a Mexicali court for “lack of evidence.” The frenzy of killings in early 1975 put him again on the wanted list of Mexican and American authorities. A Mexican policeman finally arrested him on 2 March 1976. While he was in jail in Ensenada, members of a front organization called The Society of American Patriots distributed his literature from a post office box in South Pasadena, California. With rabid rhetoric the society denounced rival polygamists, government taxes, the press, welfare programs, and gun control. They threatened an invasion of Mexico and decried the U.S. presidential candidacy of Jimmy Carter, announcing, “We would rather have the death penalty placed upon Jimmy Carter, than to see him proceed further” (LeBaron 1981, 271).
Ervil’s chief antagonist in the Fundamentalist movement was Rulon C. Allred. LeBaron had accused Allred in the fall of 1975 of “engaging in psychological warfare against one of the foremost champions of liberty of all time [LeBaron].” His letter closed with a warning: “We have very impressive methods of causing the rights of honorable men to be recognized, respected and upheld” (Bradlee and Van Atta 1981, 215). Having Ervil tucked away in a Mexican jail provided a small measure of security to those who knew and feared him. But their peace was shattered when he was released in early November 1976 for “lack of evidence.” Bribery was suspected. Ervil and one of his plural wives relocated to Yuma, Arizona.
By early spring he had ordered the murder of a wayward daughter, Rebecca LeBaron. During a 20 April 1977 meeting of followers in Dallas, Texas, he announced that the Lord wanted members of the group to prepare for a mission to Utah. He decreed that on 3 May there was to be a funeral in Salt Lake City at which his brother Verlan LeBaron should be killed. Furthermore, Ervil announced, the funeral would be Rulon Allred’s. The self-proclaimed prophet of God announced that Allred’s murder should be done by the group’s two prettiest women. The floor was opened to nominations and two young women were chosen (ibid., 232-36).
Rulon C. Allred was a naturopath by profession, treating health disorders by prescribing special diets, sunshine, massage, and exercise. Born to a prominent polygamous family in the Mexican state of Chihuahua in 1906, the seventy-one-year-old husband of at least eleven women was the spiritual leader of thousands of Fundamentalists by 1977. At 4:45 on the afternoon of 10 May 1977 Allred was finishing the day at his Murray, Utah, office when two young women later identified as Rena Chynoweth and Ramona Marston entered the building where Allred, his wife and assistant Melba, and several patients remained. “Oh my God! My God!” witnesses heard Allred scream as Chynoweth allegedly pumped several bullets into his body.
Initial suspicion for the murder centered on Alex Joseph. Journalists loved Joseph’s quotable humor and candor and his willingness to be photographed with his attractive wives. He had received wide media coverage in national as well as local publications. The highly visible polygamist had fallen from Allred’s favor in 1970 over financial disagreements. But Joseph denied killing Rulon Allred. His best guess, he informed police officers, was that Ervil LeBaron had orchestrated the murder.
Funeral services for Allred were held on 14 May 1977 at the Bingham High School auditorium—the only facility in the area large enough to accommodate the anticipated thousands of mourners. Television cameras and news reporters were everywhere. Verlan LeBaron, sitting in the back of the room, did not find out until much later that the mass presence of the news media and tight police security had saved his life. A hit squad, sent by Ervil to assassinate Verlan, dared not attempt the deed after surveying the situation.
After four months of painstaking investigation, prosecutor David Yocum and investigating officers Dick and Paul Forbes met with a Salt Lake City judge and presented their evidence. The judge signed complaints against eleven persons for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and attempted murder. On 23 September 1977 more than a hundred law enforcement officers simultaneously raided ten different locations in Denver and Dallas. The operation netted only four of the principles; Ervil LeBaron was not among them. It was 6 March 1979 before the long-awaited murder trial got underway, with only four of the accused present: Rena, Mark, and Victor Chynoweth and Eddie Marston. After two weeks of testimony the jury found all four defendants innocent.
Ervil LeBaron was not apprehended by Mexican officials until 25 May 1979. He came to trial in a U.S. courtroom for the first time in his life on Monday, 12 May 1980. After listening to more than two weeks of testimony, the jury retired to deliberate. Foreman Andrew Smith shortly called for a vote on the most serious charge that “on or about the 10th day of May 1977 … [Ervil LeBaron] did solicit, request, command, encourage or intentionally aid others to intentionally or knowingly cause the death of Rulon Clark Allred”—murder in the first degree. The vote was eleven to one for conviction. The decision required unanimity. After three more hours, the jury returned to the court. The group found LeBaron guilty of the murder of Rulon Allred and guilty of conspiring to murder his own brother, Verlan LeBaron.
Many Utahns were surprised to hear news reports on 16 August 1981 that Ervil LeBaron had been found dead at 5:30 a.m. in his maximum security cell at the Utah State Prison. Cause of death: a massive heart attack. Two days later Verlan LeBaron, whom Ervil had ordered murdered on at least two occasions, met his death in a grinding head-on collision near Mexico City. The final scenes in the Ervil LeBaron saga seemed to come to a close on 21 August when the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Anna Marston, one of the fourteen wives of the self-proclaimed “One Mighty and Strong,” claimed her husband’s body and had him interred in Resthaven Cemetery in Bellaire, Texas.
But LeBaron’s influence would soon extend beyond the grave. Prior to his death he compiled a “hit list” of people he felt had betrayed him during his imprisonment. Recorded in a “Book of New Covenants,” these individuals were singled out for execution, apparently by some of LeBaron’s children. The first target of LeBaron’s divine justice was Leo Evoniuk, who in a power struggle had earlier killed LeBaron’s son Arturo. In May 1987, Watsonville, California, authorities found Evoniuk’s dentures in a pool of blood with several casings from a 9-mm handgun strewn about. The man was presumed dead though his body was not recovered. The case remains unresolved.
Daniel Jordan, one of the “French Missionaries,” met his death five months later, on 16 October 1987, while deer hunting with nine of his wives and twenty-one of his children in Sanpete County, Utah. An unknown assailant gunned him down. Aaron LeBaron, the twenty-year-old son of Ervil, was hunting with the group. Hours after Jordan’s funeral in Bennett, Colorado, young LeBaron declared himself new patriarch of the clan with the “keys to civil power”—essentially the power of life and death—over family members. Terrified, Jordan family members had LeBaron arrested on charges of making threats. The charges were later dismissed, and he left the state, taking with him eight other of Ervil LeBaron’s children who had been placed in Colorado foster homes.
On 27 June 1988, near 4:00 p.m., the 144th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, the “Lambs of God” struck again. In a coordinated operation, former LeBaron henchman Duane Chynoweth and his young daughter Jennifer were shot to death in a pickup truck parked outside a vacant house in Houston, Texas. Chynoweth’s brother Mark, a son-in-law of Ervil LeBaron, was simultaneously murdered near his business about ten miles away, while three hundred miles away, Eddie Marston, one of LeBaron’s stepsons, was also killed.
Investigators in these murders suspected that three of LeBaron’s sons—Andrew, 28; Heber, 27; and Aaron, 20—were leading a small band of teenage brothers and sisters, the next generation of followers of LeBaron’s “Church of the Lamb of God.” Heber LeBaron and four other members of the elusive clan were arrested in a stolen vehicle in Arizona on 1 July 1988. A recovered truck matched the suspect vehicle in the Chynoweth and Marston slayings. But despite additional evidence and extensive police investigation, none of those arrested were charged with any of the murders, all six of which remain unresolved.
Ervil LeBaron’s body was scarcely cold in his Texas grave before other tales of blood atonement, conspiracy, and polygamy again hit the newsstands. On the evening of 24 July 1984, a young American Fork husband and father, Allen Lafferty, returned home from work to discover the slashed bodies of his wife Brenda and fifteen-month-old daughter Erica. Investigative efforts of law enforcement officials resulted in the arrest of two of Allen’s brothers, Ronald W. and Daniel C., and two alleged accomplices. Polygamy was rumored to be at the bottom of the slayings.
Ron and Dan Lafferty grew up in a strong Mormon household in Payson, Utah. After serving as LDS missionaries (Ron in Florida and Dan in Scotland), both returned to Utah and married in LDS temples. Their lives, however, were anything but normal Mormon. They became heavily involved in the study of Fundamentalist teachings and writings, and both were excommunicated from the LDS church, for, among other reasons, their belief in the practice of polygamy.
The brothers found a kindred spirit in Bob Crossfield, a self-proclaimed prophet who had recently moved with his plural wives from Canada to Genola, Utah. Crossfield had been receiving revelations for twenty years, many of which he had forwarded to Mormon church officials in Salt Lake City. In 1979 he was commanded by God to move his families to Utah, where he wanted to re-establish the “School of Prophets” originally instituted by Joseph Smith. Crossfield’s millennialistic views were quickly accepted by the Lafferty brothers.
Members of the “School of Prophets” believed that a “city of refuge” would be established in Salem, Utah, near the entrance of a controversial mine, established in 1894 when its founder reported that he had been directed to the spot by an angel.5 According to Dan Lafferty, part of the visionary plans of the “School of Prophets” included the re-establishment of the United Order and the Council of Fifty. Plural marriage was a prominent part of these plans. Members of the “School of Prophets,” according to Dan Lafferty, believed that “in an early premortal existence everyone was created with a soul-mate of the opposite sex—an eternal companion. For every man there was a woman, and for every woman a man. But there was a war in heaven in which one-third of the souls, all men, rebelled against God and were cast out, leaving most of the women without companions. To solve the problem, the extra women were assigned as plural mates to the remaining men.” Lafferty elaborated that “while the duty of every man in this world is to live as good a life as possible, to become sanctified, the primary goal of every woman is to find the man to whom she was assigned in the pre-existence” (Nelson 1984, 8).
The difficulties for Ron Lafferty, according to one source, began when he had trouble convincing his wife that he should take plural wives. Apparently when she was warming to the concept, his sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, persuaded her against it. The articulate Brenda, who had worked as a hostess for a newsmagazine program at KBYU-TV, was the most formidable anti-polygamy force in the Lafferty family.
Ron and other members of Crossfield’s “School of Prophets” had been instructed in how to obtain revelations. In March 1984 Ron received a revelation in which the Lord purportedly told him to “remove” four individuals who were “obstacles in my path.” Brenda and Erica were on that list. While refusing to divulge details of the 24 July murders, Dan Lafferty admitted in the 23 September 1984 Central Utah Journal that the revelation his brother had received required that a “show” be made of the killings “as a warning to others on ‘the Lord’s hit list’ who need to repent.”
Chip Carnes, one of two drifters accompanying Ron and Dan Lafferty to Brenda Lafferty’s home on 24 July 1984, agreed to testify against the Laffertys in order to have capital homicide charges against him dropped. On that fateful summer day, Carnes said, the brothers forced themselves into Brenda’s home and began to beat her. Ron Lafferty later related “he didn’t know what got into him, whether it was the Lord or what, but he went and cut a piece of cord off the vacuum cleaner and while Dan held her down, he tied the cord around her throat until she went limp. Then he grabbed her chin, pulled her head back, and cut her throat from ear to ear.” Walking into the bedroom where the crying baby was, Dan killed her as well, later saying “no problem, it was easy” (Salt Lake Tribune, 2 May 1985).
A few weeks following the double killing the brothers were captured in Nevada and returned to Utah where both were eventually found guilty. Dan was sentenced to life imprisonment because of a hung jury in the penalty phase of his trial. Ron, whose trial was delayed because of a suicide attempt, was sentenced to death despite defense attorneys’ strategy to convince jurists that he was suffering from “paranoid delusions and believed he was granted a God-given ‘moral imperative’ to murder.”
A less dramatic, contemporary case was the 1982 firing of a Murray, Utah, policeman, Royston Potter, for having two wives. The Jehovah’s Witness-turned-Catholic-turned-Mormon was trying to “save” a neighbor from Mormon Fundamentalism in 1979 when the polygamist instead swayed Potter’s perspective. “It was like being hit right between the eyes,” Potter recalled in the 26 February 1983 Salt Lake Tribune. The discovery that Fundamentalism was more compelling than mainstream Mormonism “devastated me, yet I couldn’t soak up enough knowledge.” Though they found polygamy “threatening,” Potter and his temple-married wife Denise became convinced that plural marriage was necessary “in order to obtain the highest level of existence in the next life” (Strack 1983, 7). On 26 April 1980 Potter took a second wife, Vera Lee Delancey. Fully aware that his Fundamentalist views could get him into legal trouble, he wanted to be a policeman nevertheless, “to help people.” After his polygamous lifestyle was exposed, Potter was interviewed by a Murray internal affairs officer on 15 November 1982. Two weeks later he was terminated from his job, according to Mayor LaRell D. Muir, for “failure to comply with his oath of office and rules and regulations of the police department.” He was also excommunicated from the LDS church.
Like most polygamists with roots grounded in Mormonism, Potter viewed the Utah anti-polygamy laws as unconstitutional, an interference with his First Amendment rights. After his firing, he protested publicly that he was being denied his legal rights. He argued that his marital status had not affected his work performance and objected to unequal enforcement of the law. Other police officers, he argued, were guilty of fornication and adultery, both misdemeanors under Utah law, but were still working for Murray City. When the Murray Civil Service Commission upheld his dismissal, Potter filed a civil suit in U.S. district court. Requesting reinstatement and retroactive pay, Potter insisted that the right “to practice plural marriage is protected under the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment,” and that “the U.S. Constitution takes precedence over the State Constitution” (Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Feb. 1983).
Though there has never been a federal or state court ruling that has held polygamous marriage to be constitutional, neither has the issue of polygamy been tested in the U.S. Supreme Court since Reynolds. Potter claimed that he did not want to become a “battering ram of the Lord,” but he was prepared to take his grievance far enough to effect reversal of the 1879 Reynolds v. the United States decision, which had stood for more than a century as the landmark case respecting religious freedoms in the United States.
Potter lost his first round of appeals when U.S. district court judge Sherman Christensen ruled on 27 April 1984 that Potter’s assertion of First Amendment protection was without merit. “The practice of polygamy,” the judge ruled, “is not a fundamental right constitutionally protected by the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment or any right of privacy or liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment” (Salt Lake Tribune, 28 April 1984). In Potter’s second appeal, before the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, justices ruled that, because monogamy is the “bedrock upon which our culture is built,” the State of Utah is justified in upholding and enforcing its ban on plural marriage (Salt Lake Tribune, 13 May 1985). Potter subsequently petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes that it would consider his appeal, but the high court declined, without comment, in early October 1985 to review the case, leaving intact the ruling of the Tenth Circuit Court. For the meantime, Reynolds v. the United States stands unmarred: polygamy is not protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Many historians and legal scholars believe that Reynolds will eventually be modified. Social attitudes influence judicial decisions. Popular opinion and legislative action since 1879 have demonstrated significant change in the way variant lifestyles are viewed by many Americans. Legal scholar Robert G. Dyer pointed out in a 1977 Utah Bar Journal article that “more tolerant social attitudes toward homosexuality, adultery, obscenity, prostitution, and unusual marriage styles would make it difficult to attack polygamy as being violative of the peace and good order of society. Judicial attitudes towards obscenity, privacy, and the protection of individual freedoms, even if manifested by socially deviant behavior, have made necessary a clear showing of danger or detriment to other members of society in order for the conduct to be validly regulated.” As Dyer indicates, “while there was much nineteenth century rhetoric concerning the evils of polygamy, there is no solid scientific data indicating that the practice is detrimental to society. In fact, the success with which many nations have long lived with polygamy is indicative that it is an alternate family style, no better and no worse, perhaps, than monogamy” (p. 45).
Additionally, Edwin Firmage, prominent University of Utah law professor, feels that “the basic underpinnings of Reynolds v. the United States have been shredded” (Strack 1983, 8). His view finds support in several cases. In Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), a Jehovah’s Witness suit claimed unjust police interference with missionary efforts. The U.S. Supreme Court, though not unaware of “abrasive” techniques used by the group, nevertheless ruled in favor of their religious rights. The court also upheld in Sherbert v. Werner (1965) the right of a Seventh-Day Adventist woman to refuse to work on her Sabbath day.
Perhaps the most significant blow to Reynolds was Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972). A group of Amish parents refused to send their children to secondary schools, claiming that allowing them to mix with non-Amish children endangered the salvation of their children by exposing them to the very worldliness their religion taught them to shun. When the court’s decision went to the Amish, Justice William O. Douglas noted that the decision was a departure from Reynolds and suggested that “in time Reynolds will be overruled” (Dyer 1977, 44).
Royston Potter’s legal claim centered on First Amendment rights, but his case raised other legal and social questions. Why were anti-polygamy laws passed in the first place? Why have countless violations of anti-bigamy and anti-polygamy laws gone unprosecuted for nearly twenty-five years in Utah and elsewhere? Although these and other questions will undoubtedly be resolved some day before the highest court of appeals, countless nagging theological issues will remain. To the historian, relevant questions might center on how the course of Mormon history would have been altered had the federal government not opposed polygamy or had Joseph Smith not introduced plural marriage in the first place. Much of the development of Mormonism can be linked to the introduction, promotion, and eventual abnegation of polygamy. To those who accept Joseph Smith as a prophet of God, plural marriage can be evidence of his divine calling; to those who question or reject his prophetic claims, polygamy is more readily explained as evidence of his downfall.
While Independent Fundamentalist Roy Potter’s confrontation with the federal government ended on a peaceful note, such was not the case in early 1988 at the Singer/Swapp family compound in Marion, Utah. Fifteen years earlier John and Vickie Singer had removed their children from the public school system to educate them at home instead. Later the effectiveness of this home-schooling came into question. Officials contended with Singer in numerous court settings in which he was usually uncooperative. The matter was further complicated when Singer took a second wife, Shirley Black, who was legally married to another man. As her children joined her at the Singer house, a custody battle ensued. Singer illegally supported Black’s efforts to keep her children from being turned over to their father.
After considerable friction local authorities attempted to serve Singer with an arrest warrant as he walked out to his mail box on 18 January 1979. He reportedly threatened them with a gun and then tried to flee. He was shot in the back and killed during the confrontation. While many felt the officers were justified in their actions, John Singer’s family view the act as cold-blooded murder.
The Singer scenario was being closely watched at the time by nineteen-year-old Addam Swapp, a budding Fundamentalist from Fairview, Utah, who held John Singer in awe. Swapp visited the Singer home in early 1980 and vowed to marry sixteen-year-old Heidi Singer. Three years after marrying her, he also married her younger sister Charlotte.
Moving into the Singer compound Swapp assumed the patriarchal role left vacant by John Singer and began his own dynasty by fathering six children by his two wives. He was also being steeped in the family’s views of John Singer’s death. His anger seemed to grow like a cancer. In a 22 June 1988 letter to Utah Holiday writer Jean Bucher, Swapp wrote: “The Government of the State of Utah, combined with the powers of the Mormon Church, tried to make a publick example out of [Vickie and John] when they took their children out of the school system. They wanted to show the rest of the free and independent thinkers in Utah, whom I call Free Men, that they are the Supreme Power. They did not want anyone to oppose their will, for they felt that if one man could stand against them, he might start a chain reaction causing others also to stand against their corrupt system.… Because he would not bend his knee to the wicked rule of the State, Church combination, [John Singer] was murdered in cold blood, by hired Government assassins” (p. 38).
During the early morning hours of 16 January 1988 Swapp and other family members, following what they believed to be a divine edict, broke into the Kamas, Utah, LDS Stake Center, near their house, and left a bomb consisting of eighty-seven sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock timing device. They left behind an Indian-like spear, with an attached noted bearing the date “Jan. 18, 1979,” stuck into a baseball diamond near the church. At 3:00 a.m. a powerful explosion severely damaged the vacant $1.5 million building.
The Singer/Swapp clan was immediately suspected in the blast. Law enforcement officials surrounded the family farm and ordered Addam Swapp and Vickie Singer to surrender. They refused, promising a fight if lawmen came on their property. One of Swapp’s cousins, Roger Bates, told police that Swapp sought an armed confrontation because he had received a “revelation from God that John Singer will rise from the dead to protect them at the moment police launch their attack.” Furthermore, Bates explained that family members believed “John Singer’s resurrection will trigger the downfall of corrupt government and religious institutions and clear the way for the second coming of Jesus Christ” (Salt Lake Tribune, 29 Jan. 1988).
Warrants for the arrest of Addam Swapp and Vickie Singer were signed by Fifth Circuit judge Maurice D. Jones, charging the them with aggravated arson, criminal mischief, and possession of an infernal device in connection with the bombing. But they were not about to surrender. For thirteen days the compound was under seige by scores of law enforcement personnel. Early on 28 January, officers with dogs hid in a nearby building and waited for Addam Swapp to start his morning chores. Emerging at about 8:30 a.m., Swapp and his brother Jonathan were surprised by the hidden lawmen. During the gun battle, Addam Swapp was wounded and police officer Fred House was killed. The remaining family members in the Singer home surrendered. Charges were brought against four of them.
Nine months later, on 2 September, and after a thirteen-day trial in U.S. District Court, Judge Bruce Jenkins awarded all four convicted Singer/Swapp members minimum sentences. Seige leader Addam Swapp was ordered to prison for fifteen years, Vickie Singer received five years, and co-defendants Jonathan Swapp and John Timothy Singer were each given ten years. Five days later John Timothy Singer, the trigger-man in Officer House’s death, and the two Swapp brothers were charged by the state with second-degree murder. After deliberating for three days in late December, a jury found Addam Swapp and Singer guilty of manslaughter, a second-degree felony, and Jonathan Swapp guilty of misdemeanor negligent homicide (Salt Lake Tribune, 23 Dec. 1988).
Third district court judge Michael R. Murphy ruled on 26 January 1989 that “these defendants acted as anarchists and this court has been presented with no credible information that, if given the opportunity, they would not again engage in anarchism and armed conflict.” He then imposed the maximum sentence possible on the trio: one-to-fifteen years in the Utah state prison for Addam Swapp and John Timothy Singer and one year in prison for Jonathan Swapp. These sentences will not be served until the men have completed their lengthy federal prison terms (Salt Lake Tribune, 27 Jan. 1989).
Aside from their practice of polygamy, most Fundamentalists are law-abiding citizens. High-profile polygamists such as the Singers, Swapps, Laffertys, and LeBarons are throwbacks to late-nineteenth-century Mormonism when opposition to the federal government was a badge of courage and honor. The leaders of smaller—although sometimes no less bizarre—splinter groups, such as John W. Bryant, usually maintain lower profiles.
Like many other Independent Fundamentalists, Bryant first converted to mainstream Mormonism. Obsessed with early Mormon teachings on polygamy, he later joined the Apostolic United Brethren (the Rulon Allred group) and soon took a second wife, Dawn Samuels (not her real name), now totally disaffected from Mormonism and Mormon Fundamentalism. Dawn’s experiences with modern polygamy shed light onto the psychology of conversion to Fundamentalism, as well as on the practices of her ex-husband, who has attracted followers in Utah, Oregon, and California.
Also a convert, Dawn joined the LDS church because of its emphasis on families and eternal marriage. “Most of the guys I’d dated before seemed too immature or superficial to fit into that dream. I wanted a man of greater spiritual substance who would somehow make my life more meaningful and secure.” She had known Bryant years before in Connecticut, and they renewed their acquaintance in Utah after he married her former roommate. Though initially opposed to polygamy, Dawn, who believed her life had “become an emotional and financial struggle leading nowhere,” felt pressured to join the Allred group and to become Bryant’s second wife. Though not in love with Bryant at the time, she remembers that “part of the appeal of conversion is that they make you feel that you are something special and also that you really ‘belong’ in that group.”
Other members of the Allred group pushed her to join them as well, but Bryant was the deciding factor. “People like John,” Dawn says today, “are either sure they have all the answers or they’re in the process of getting them. Part of his charisma was that he wasn’t just some con man selling a bill of goods to gullible people. He was so single-minded in his own search for God that his enthusiasm created a sense of certainty. He believed that he was being led by God and his sincerity and intelligence convinced others. People trapped in nine-to-five routines without an overriding purpose can be easily motivated by someone who seems to have some answers.”
For a time Bryant and his wives remained with the Allreds, even moving to Pinesdale, Montana, where some of the group attempted to live communally. But after staying in that depressed area through one “bitter cold winter,” the Bryants returned to Salt Lake City. Within three years, Bryant was claiming a “visionary experience” in which he was told “he was the right person to fulfill a certain position in the priesthood.” Dawn relates that he claimed “Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and Jesus had appeared to him” after which “he was transported to the City of Enoch where the Melchizedek and Patriarchal Priesthoods were bestowed on him.” He was then “put through certain ordinances and then spent the next three days writing [them] down.”
With Dawn set apart as “The High Priestess of the Last Dispensation,” Bryant began bestowing his newly revealed ordinances on others. Collecting a small group of followers, which he called The Church of Christ Patriarchal, Bryant wrote prolifically while operating a Salt Lake City bookstore. Dawn joined him in highly secretive “sacred ordinances” which soon evolved into sexual rites.
Bryant would conduct a special “marriage ceremony before each time we had intercourse with someone we weren’t married to.” Dawn adds that there were various levels to this procedure: “one level was that you would have a marriage ceremony before each time you’d sleep together. The next level was that you’d be ‘sealed’ [joined or united] for a certain period of time, like a month or two. Then you were allowed to have sex with that person any time you wanted, provided John gave permission at the specific time. The third level was to be sealed into a family unit. For instance, if a single person were sealed into mine and John’s family, then all the sexual rights of marriage existed within that unit as long as John approved.” This applied to heterosexual and homosexual couplings.
Though the “sacred ordinances” were secret, they were not private. “John was always there whenever I was with someone else,” Dawn continues, “there were usually three together and John didn’t just observe. He would take part or guide us.… There were strong, caring feelings involved. I had a total of seven husbands over the years and had children by three of them. John considered these ‘holy children’ and claimed that having sex with more than one man at a time allowed the child-spirit to have a choice of more than one sperm. So the spirit could choose who would be the father. It probably sounds shocking, but it seemed like we were helping each other through this intimate sharing of ourselves. After all, John made it seem like God approved and considered it a necessary part of our spiritual development.”
Eventually Bryant’s group included a millionaire and funds were sufficient to purchase a 360-acre ranch near Mesquite, Nevada. Initially such isolation seemed desirable, but at “The Ranch,” the group soon attracted notoriety because of Bryant’s expansion of the third level of ordinances—family sealings. He was sealed within many families, and “soon it was opened up so that sex, even incest, could be with almost anyone, anytime.” The situation became impossible for Dawn. She became angry at what was happening and refused to take part when “things had deteriorated to a level that wasn’t good or Christlike.” Gradually Dawn began to feel that Bryant had lied and manipulated them to have power over them—often sexually. She described Bryant as being attracted to a polygamous lifestyle since it accommodated both his sexual and religious urges.
Once she decided to leave, Dawn feared that she would not be allowed to take her children with her. “I knew the only way I’d be able to take my children would be through a show of force.” She enlisted the aid of the local police. When the officers arrived and confronted Bryant, he argued that without birth certificates Dawn could not prove the children were hers. One officer replied that “he couldn’t image any woman in her right mind wanting a whole bunch of kids that weren’t hers.” Dawn left with the children.6
Moving back to Salt Lake City, Dawn began a new life. Despite economic hardships and raising six children alone, she finished her degree at the University of Utah. She then obtained a good job and is today “determined to not fall into the trap of thinking that someone else has better answers for me than I do.”
When asked why she initially believed in Bryant’s teachings, she responds today: “He was very charismatic, very convincing. He’d show certain scriptures and then quote something out of the journals or writings of [nineteenth-century] Mormon prophets.… It didn’t seem like he was manipulating the situation because he appeared to believe in what he was saying. I didn’t realize the mind control he was using until years later. We were so conditioned to believe in biblical and Book of Mormon-era prophets that it didn’t seem unreasonable that God could work through Joseph Smith or John [Bryant].… It’s hard for me to look back and realize that I could make these ‘leaps-of-faith’ so easily. But I cared deeply about what I believed to be spiritual living that would one day lead us to heaven. And conversely I was terrified of apostasy and ending up consigned to outer darkness if I showed a lack of faith. There was an implicit view that individual doubts, skepticism, and criticisms were invalid, or possibly evil, if they differed with accepted ideas of the group. It wasn’t a giant step to take from Mormon prohibitions about ‘evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed’ to accepting John’s visionary claims to priesthood leadership.” Finally, Dawn remembers achieving a spiritual awareness that “we find God from within. Religion [can] help that process or hinder it, but it [isn’t] necessary. All those things I’d been told were necessary to find God really weren’t. That was when I felt really free of John and that whole mindset, and could leave without guilt or regret.”
Certainly, the final chapter on Mormon polygamy has yet to be written. Its roots have spread far and deep, and plural marriage will probably be practiced for generations to come by Mormon splinter groups. The subject, long the focus of heated debate in the past, will continue to be a controversial one for many Mormons. Yet if Mormons and non-Mormons alike are ever to understand the heritage of one of America’s most successful native religions it seems important for them to begin asking why.
1. LDS president Spencer W. Kimball was aware that it was in 1904 and not in 1890 that the church officially intended to stop polygamy. Interviewed by Gary L. Shumway in 1972 as part of the James M. Moyle Oral History Program, LDS Archives, Kimball, in explaining Fannie Woolley’s post-Manifesto marriage to George C. Parkinson, said: “It was about 1902. I don’t know just when the Manifesto was made operative in all the world, including Canada and Mexico, but Aunt Fannie was married before the late President Joseph F. Smith ‘locked the gate.’”
2. For discussions of these various groups, see Hilton 1965; Shields 1982; Wright 1963; Jessee 1959; and Rich 1967.
3. Simons was last seen alive on 23 April 1975 in the company of Lloyd Sullivan. According to Sullivan’s later testimony, Simons was killed that evening near Price, Utah, by Eddie Marston and Mark Chynoweth. Simons’s body was exhumed from its makeshift grave on 31 March 1978. Marston, the only individual brought to trial on this case, was later found innocent (Bradlee and Van Atta 1981, 181-91, 288-92).
4. This shooting occurred on 16 June 1975. White was found guilty of the murder on 14 May 1979 and given a life sentence (Bradlee and Van Atta 1981, 192-202, 328-29).
5. John Koyle’s Relief Mine is on a mountainside northeast of Salem, Utah, in Utah Valley. In 1894, Mormon bishop Koyle claimed a vision in which a heavenly messenger appeared to him on three separate nights, showing him vast stores of gold coins and rich ore deep in the mountain which, it was said, would be for the purpose of “saving the Church.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars were contributed by Mormons to the mining venture. Thousands of feet of shaft were sunk, and eventually Koyle was excommunicated for seeking financial support despite the advice of church leaders to abandon the efforts.
6. For a public account of the raid on Bryant’s settlement, see “Metro Raids Polygamy Cult,” Las Vegas Sun, 27 March 1981, 1.