Historically, when they wanted to, Mormons did fucked up crime and deviancy pretty well. And if it’s debauched murdering you’re wanting, look no further than the Church of the First Born Lamb of God, a fundamentalist, murderous Mormon cult headed up by Ervil LeBaron, who would end up getting dubbed the “Mormon Manson” by the media.
LeBaron believed in “blood atonement” – that some acts are so heinous they need to be avenged by spilling the blood of the perpetrator – and his crimes are the subject of the new ABC News Studios docuseries, Daughters of the Cult.
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But to understand who Ervil was, you first need to understand the Mormon Church in the late 19th and early 20th century. In order to be admitted into the Union during the American Civil War, the state of Utah – the founding turf of the Mormon Church – was pressured to ban polygamous marriage in 1890. This upset fundamentalist Mormon communities, of which a number relocated to Mexico to keep the whole multiples wives thing going.
One such horndog was Ervil’s father, Alma Dayer LeBaron, who settled south of the U.S.-Mexico border in 1924. He raised a family of eleven children in a house that revolved around Alma’s “obsession with heavenly visions”, according to the LA Times.
By 1944, Alma Dayer LeBaron was building a community there where ‘“God’s chosen people could prosper and practice polygamy”, says author Ruth Wariner, a descendent of the family. Ervil and his older brother, Joel, broke away from their father, pledging their allegiance instead to the LDS (Latter-day Saints) Church, but they were soon excommunicated for teaching and practising polygamy.
The family, led by Joel, founded the Church of the Firstborn which fractured into warring factions after Alma’s death. Ervil – who went onto have 13 wives and 50 children – challenged Joel’s leadership in the late 60s and decided to break off and found the Church of the First Born Lamb of God, centred on the belief of blood atonement.
Ervil used this doctrine to order hits all over the shop. Driven by fantastical visions – he claimed he was doing the victims a favour by allowing them into heaven – Ervil eventually had Joel murdered in 1974. Ervil was convicted for it, but released on a technicality, with some alleging bribery.
“We were taught to live in awe of him as God’s prophet, as the one true prophet on Earth,” Anna LeBaron, Ervil’s daughter, tells the BBC.
According to the LA Times, Ervil’s cult killed at least 25 people in the U.S. and Mexico, although some bodies were never found. Those killed included rivals and people who went against the Church of the First Born Lamb of God.
Ervil was sent to prison in 1977 for the murder of one such rival, but – such was his influence – his family and followers continued to commit crimes and murders beyond his death, which happened in 1981, aged 56, in prison.
”It wasn’t until after he died that it kind of started to break up and that power was lost,” Anna tells the BBC in 2017. “However, even from the grave, he was able to control people and their actions and that is just mind-blowing.”
The cult members carried on the violent whims of their deceased leader into the 90s, basing their 50-man hit list on a theological tract written by Ervil, named The Book of the New Covenants, which he’d written during his incarceration, Anna tells the BBC. Several members of the cult were arrested in the 80s and 90s, and one was arrested as late as 2011 in connection with four murders in Texas.
In a strange twist, on November 4th 2019, several members of the family were killed by Mexican hitmen when nine people, including six children, were massacred in a three-car convoy en route to a wedding. The LeBaron family had been speaking out against the narcotraffickers in the area and for the need for looser gun controls in order to protect themselves.
Daughters of the Cult is a five-part series diving into the history of Ervil LeBaron’s cult, as told by Ervil’s children. Produced by ABC News Studios, All3Media and Main Event Media, it will be available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. from the 4th of January.
