Under the Banner of Heaven (37 page)

Annie and Kenyon’s oldest child, Lena, who is now forty-two, confirms that he was a bad father. “Dad is a mean son of a bitch,” she says bluntly, “although it took me until I was in my thirties to really see who he was. He’s a mean, mean man who doesn’t care about anybody but himself.” Kenyon was physically abusive to all his children, but he was especially vicious to Lena. When she was eleven, he grabbed a heavy tractor fan belt and gave her a particularly brutal whipping, “for no reason at all that I could tell,” Lena remembers. “We were living in Las Cruces [New Mexico]. I still have the scars on the backs of my legs.”

In the early 1980s, Kenyon’s fortunes seemed to take an upward turn. He moved his family to the pious community of Salem, in Utah County, where he entered into a business partnership with an affable Mormon named Bernard Brady. Kenyon converted Brady to fundamentalism, the two men began selling shares in tax-sheltered financial trusts, and as a side venture they invested in the legendary Dream Mine, which dominated the mountainside above Salem. Soon millions of dollars were flowing into the Blackmore-Brady business account. Each man bought a lavish home below the Dream Mine. Life was good.

During this period, Kenyon would make frequent sales trips, roaming across western North America in search of investors. In 1983, during one of these trips, he went to Mexico and secretly married Gwendolyn Stubbs LeBaron, the winsome daughter of Lavina Stubbs and the late Joel LeBaron.

Around this time, as well, Kenyon introduced Bernard Brady to a longtime friend of his from Canada, the Prophet Onias, whom Kenyon had first met when he was working as a schoolteacher in Bountiful seventeen years earlier. Onias, who had just moved to Utah County in order to build his City of Refuge below the Dream Mine, was in the process of launching his School of the Prophets, and he invited Brady to join. Flattered and grateful, Brady returned the favor by recruiting into the school five brothers from an “outstanding” Utah County family: Tim, Watson, Mark, Dan, and Ron Lafferty. Not long thereafter, Kenyon’s brief fling with good fortune came to a screeching halt.

Brenda and Erica Lafferty were murdered in American Fork on July 24, 1984, and right away the police considered Kenyon Blackmore and Bernard Brady to be prime suspects, along with everyone else even remotely associated with the School of the Prophets. But law enforcement officers had actually become well acquainted with Brady and Blackmore experience for Annie. Not only did she discover that Kenyon had a new wife who was the same age as their oldest daughter, but this young woman had just given birth to a baby daughter of her own with Kenyon. Delivered in Colonia LeBaron exactly three days before Dan Lafferty cut the throats of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, the little girl had been named Evangeline.

After failing to persuade Kenyon to return to Utah with her, Annie went home alone, in utter shock. But she couldn’t let herself give up on him. “I was committed to the marriage,” she says. “I didn’t want to be a quitter.” So in January 1985 she went back to Mexico and again asked Kenyon to come home. And this time he agreed.

As soon as he crossed the border into El Paso, Texas, however, Kenyon was surrounded by FBI agents and placed in handcuffs. A brother-in-law—one of the investors who had been swindled by Kenyon—had tipped them off. Seeing no alternative, following his arrest Kenyon entered into a plea bargain with the government and was incarcerated in a federal lockup in Tallahassee, Florida.

After his release from prison in late 1991, Kenyon Blackmore returned to the town where he was born—Cardston, Alberta. Annie had given up on him by this point and filed for divorce, but Kenyon made an effort to reunite with their oldest daughter, Lena, in Cardston, the hub of Canadian Mormondom. Although Lena tried to give her father the benefit of the doubt, she wasn’t comfortable around Gwendolyn, the wife who had supplanted her mother, or the two children Gwendolyn had had with Kenyon by this point. “It was disturbing to see how my dad and her were raising those kids,” Lena says. “They had them on some extremely weird natural diet. And Ken wouldn’t let them use soap, or brush their teeth. The kids looked malnourished and smelled bad. My dad and his wife did too. They just stunk. It was disgusting.”

Lena might have been able to put up with all that, but then her father stole her vehicle. “I had this nice new truck,” she says, “and I was having some financial difficulties. So Dad said he’d make the payments for me and pay the insurance if he could use it for a little while.” After driving off in Lena’s truck, however, Kenyon didn’t bother to make any of the promised payments, which she discovered only when the bank threatened to repossess it. Furious, she called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who in turn alerted Kenyon’s probation officer, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. “Ken discovered he’d bit into the wrong bone this time,” Lena says. Upon learning he was wanted by the law again, Kenyon fled south with Gwendolyn and their kids to his old hideaway, Colonia LeBaron.

Back in Mexico, Kenyon married a third wife, who happened to be Gwendolyn’s half sister. He departed Colonia LeBaron soon thereafter with both wives and all their children, and lit out across Central America. Over the years that followed he had four more children with each wife. He supported all these dependents, after a fashion, by doing odd jobs, selling natural foods, working as a massage therapist, and running petty scams. “He got money lots of different ways,” says Evangeline Blackmore, the oldest of the kids Ken had with Gwendolyn. Now a tall, blond, exotic-looking eighteen-year-old who speaks English with a trace of a Mexican accent, Evangeline explains that Kenyon “would buy and sell gold once in a while. When we were in Mexico he made saddles and other leather goods for Mexican cowboys. But mostly he would con people. My dad is a very good con artist.”

Kenyon Blackmore had always subscribed to weird religious views, but they became notably more extreme after his release from prison, when he disappeared into the shadows of Central America with his two LeBaron wives. “The LeBarons seemed to encourage Dad’s strange beliefs,” says Lena. “They were convinced he possessed God-like qualities. They would feed his fantasy, and he would feed theirs.”

As he dragged his young wives and their pack of semiferal children back and forth across Central America, Kenyon received a series of revelations in which God told him that he was “the last prophet before the return of Jesus Christ.” God told him, in fact, that Jesus would come back to earth in the form of a child born of Kenyon’s pure seed and his daughter’s virgin womb. Heeding the Lord’s commandment, in June 1996, on Evangeline’s twelfth birthday, he took her as his wife—that is to say, he began raping her on a regular basis. According to Evangeline, her father believed that he should start having sexual intercourse with her when she turned twelve “because this is when Mary, the first mother of Jesus, was impregnated.” Kenyon was convinced, she says, that “nobody else’s blood was good enough” to sire the Son of Man.

When Kenyon forced himself on Evangeline, she remembers him telling her that “I was going to hell because I wasn’t being submissive.” As she continued to resist, “he would throw me on the ground, punch me, and cover my mouth when I would try and scream.” Eventually, to keep from being beaten, she started yielding passively to her sixty-year-old father’s incestuous assaults.

“I was barely twelve years old,” Evangeline states with astounding composure. “I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I knew I didn’t like it. I felt gross. My father wouldn’t allow me to have friends, or even talk to anybody.”

During Evangeline’s ordeal at her father’s hands, Blackmore often fasted, and would force his family to fast along with him. “He was always going on liquid diets of pure orange juice, or lemon water,” says Evangeline. He came to believe that “if he makes his body pure enough, that he can move mountains, and walk through walls.” He also believed that almost everyone in the world except himself had been corrupted and was evil. Evangeline recalls Blackmore talking “about finding some innocent naive Indian tribe and converting them to his beliefs,” then systematically improving their blood by impregnating their women “with his own pure seed.”

After being raped by her father for the better part of a year, Evangeline became pregnant, but she miscarried the baby two months later. In April 1997, when she failed to conceive again, Kenyon cast Evangeline out and abandoned her in Guatemala; she was two months shy of her thirteenth birthday. “I lived by myself for about four months,” she recalls. “When I ran out of food I went to stay with some friends in Guatemala City.” After about six months, these Guatemalan acquaintances managed to contact her grandmother, Lavina, in Colonia LeBaron, and Lavina drove down to Guatemala and rescued her.

Evangeline currently lives in the American Midwest; she is married and has a baby son. She’s doing well, all things considered, but she’s extremely worried about her younger siblings, six of whom are girls, all of them still traveling with Kenyon Blackmore, presumably, somewhere in Central or South America. Her father, she reports, intends to “marry” each of his daughters when they turn twelve years old. “I’m concerned about my sisters,” Evangeline says. “I don’t want them getting raped. I’m still not over it. It’s something that… haunts you, something that’s always there.”

The oldest of Evangeline’s sisters had her twelfth birthday in May 2001, the next in February 2003; another will turn twelve in July 2004.

TWENTY-TWO

RENO

Joseph Smith bequeathed his followers a troublesome legacy, the conviction that it was “the Kingdom or nothing” and the belief that any act that promoted or protected God’s work was justified. Some have tried to dismiss Mountain Meadows as an isolated event, an aberration in the otherwise inspiring history of Utah and Mormonism, but it was much more a fulfillment of Smith’s radical doctrines. Brigham Young’s relentless commitment to the Kingdom of God forged a culture of violence from Joseph Smith’s theology that bequeathed a vexatious heritage to his successors. Early Mormonism’s peculiar obsession with blood and vengeance created the society that made the massacre possible if not inevitable. These obsessions had devastating consequences for Young’s own family. In New York in 1902, William Hooper Young, the prophet’s grandson, slit the abdomen of an alleged prostitute and wrote the words “Blood Atonement” in his father’s apartment.

Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets

It was around two o’clock on the afternoon of July 24, 1984, when Dan Lafferty cut Brenda Lafferty’s throat and let her life drain across the floor of her kitchen in a viscous crimson flood. Since he’d already killed Brenda’s baby, the first half of the removal revelation had been completed. Ron Lafferty then drove Dan, Chip Carnes, and Ricky Knapp to the home of Chloe Low, which was located on an unpaved, out-of-the-way street in Highland, Utah. Their immediate plan was to “remove” Low, as God had commanded in the second part of Ron’s revelation, then go to the nearby residence of Richard Stowe—president of the Highland LDS Stake—and slash his throat as well. Once they’d thus fulfilled the entire commandment, the path would be clear for work to commence on the City of Refuge, which was to be built next to the Dream Mine in preparation for the Last Days.

When they arrived at the Low home, Ron parked his Impala station wagon out of sight on a side street and he and Dan crept up to the house to determine who might be inside. As it happened, nobody was there: the Lows had gone to their summer home on Bear Lake, up near the Utah-Idaho border, for the Pioneer Day holiday. Ron returned to the car and told Carnes and Knapp, “Well, there ain’t nobody here, so we’re just going to rip it off and see if we can find any guns and some money or whatever we can get.” After backing the car into the Lows’ carport, Ron grabbed his 20-gauge shotgun and told Carnes to act as a lookout while he and Knapp returned to the house, where Dan was waiting for them.

Ron, having been a guest in the Low home many, many times over the previous dozen years, knew it well. After removing a window, he, Dan, and Knapp disabled the burglar alarm, entered the house, and ransacked it. While they were inside, two boys from the neighborhood drove up on a noisy all-terrain vehicle. Carnes, who was conspicuously holding a .30—30 Winchester rifle and wearing a ski mask in the suffocating July heat, dove out of the station wagon and hid in some nearby brush as the neighborhood kids approached the front door and then knocked for a long time, over and over. Inside the house, Dan and Ron heard the boys knocking but simply ignored it, calmly continuing their search for valuables. After a few minutes the boys quit pounding on the door and roared away in a cloud of blue smoke.

Dan, Ron, and Knapp stole a hundred-dollar bill, a watch, car keys, and some jewelry, and then, in an act of spite, Ron destroyed Chloe Low’s collection of porcelain figurines from Dresden, Germany, which he knew she treasured for sentimental reasons. The burglars exited the home via a back window, picked up Carnes, who was still hiding in the scrub, and drove off.

The next item of business on their agenda was the murder of Richard Stowe. Knapp was driving. Ron gave him directions to Stowe’s home, but the route was complicated and Knapp missed one of the turns. According to Dan, “Ron yelled something to Ricky like, ”Hey, that’s where we were supposed to turn!“ But by that point there wasn’t much enthusiasm for continuing to fulfill the revelation right then.”

The four men briefly discussed whether to turn around and go back to the Stowe home. Carnes, who was growing increasingly anxious, begged Ron to forget about the remainder of the revelation. “If the Lord wanted you to kill someone else today,” Carnes pleaded, “you’d already be there.” To his surprise and immense relief, Ron concurred without argument and told Knapp to continue in the direction he was heading, which would take them to Interstate 15.

Had they turned around and driven to President Stowe’s residence that afternoon, they would have found him, unlike Chloe Low, at home. He was taking advantage of the holiday to do some work on his house with his son, using a tractor to remove a set of concrete steps. It’s impossible to know what would have occurred had the Lafferty brothers gone on to Stowe’s property, but considering the number of guns in their possession, it’s not difficult to imagine the bloodshed that might have ensued if Ricky Knapp hadn’t missed the turn.