The Kirtland Cult — A family of five murdered in a barn for a false prophecy
Summary
On 17 April 1989, in a barn on a rented farm outside Kirtland, Ohio, Jeffrey Lundgren and several of his followers murdered an entire family of five — Dennis Avery, his wife Cheryl, and their three daughters, Trina, Rebecca, and Karen, the youngest a small child. The Averys were not enemies of the group; they were members of it. They were led to the barn one at a time, bound, lowered into a pit dug in the dirt floor, and shot. The bodies lay undiscovered for nine months. Lundgren was convicted of five counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to death; his wife Alice and son Damon were also convicted, and other followers received prison terms. Lundgren was executed by lethal injection on 24 October 2006.
This case is remembered for its victims, and they belong at its center. Dennis and Cheryl Avery had joined Lundgren's movement seeking deeper religious meaning; they brought their daughters into a community that turned on them. The three girls — fifteen, thirteen, and seven years old — had no part in the doctrinal disputes that supposedly condemned their family. They were children, killed on the orders of a man who told his followers it was the will of God. Whatever theology Lundgren invoked, the documented fact is the deliberate killing of three children and their parents, carried out by adults who had been persuaded to obey.
Lundgren had been a member and tour guide for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS, now Community of Christ) at the historic Kirtland Temple. After he was dismissed from his church role in 1987 amid suspicions about missing donations, he gathered a small splinter group — never more than about twenty people — and recast himself as a prophet. He taught that the group must seize the Kirtland Temple by force to bring about the appearance of Christ, and that a "pruning" of the unfaithful was required first. The Avery family, whom he judged insufficiently obedient, became the target of that doctrine.
The mechanism here was not numbers or wealth but the total psychological capture of a tiny group by one man. Lundgren used a homemade method of scriptural interpretation to claim he alone could decode God's hidden meaning, isolated his followers on a single farm, and escalated their commitment in stages until ordinary people would help him kill children. The horror lies precisely in how small and how ordinary the group was.
Timeline
The setting: a historic temple and a self-made prophet
The story is rooted in a real and revered place. The Kirtland Temple, completed in 1836, is one of the founding sites of the Latter Day Saint movement, and by the late twentieth century it was owned and maintained by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a denomination with a tradition of belief in continuing revelation. Jeffrey Lundgren, born in Missouri in 1950 and raised in that church, moved to Kirtland and became a lay tour guide at the temple, a position that lent him an aura of religious authority and a steady audience for the scripture classes he began to teach.
Lundgren's standing collapsed in 1987, when the church removed him over suspicions that he had kept donations intended for it. Rather than retreat, he reinvented himself. He declared that he was a prophet who alone could interpret scripture correctly, and a handful of conservative church members — some drawn to his certainty, some disaffected by changes in their denomination — followed him out. The group that resulted was tiny, never exceeding around twenty people, but its smallness was a source of intensity rather than weakness. Within it, Lundgren's word became absolute.
The method: decoding God and demanding everything
Lundgren held his followers through a claim of secret knowledge. He taught an idiosyncratic method of reading scripture — presenting himself as able to uncover hidden patterns and meanings invisible to ordinary believers — so that understanding God's true will required understanding Lundgren. This is a familiar engine of control: when a leader convinces people that the truth is encoded and that he alone holds the key, every question is routed back through him, and doubt becomes a sign of spiritual failure rather than reasonable caution.
Around that claim he built a structure of total demand. Followers moved onto a single rented farm, pooled or surrendered their money, and organized their days around his teaching and his needs. Cut off on the farm, immersed in his interpretations and dependent on his approval, members lost the ordinary external checks that might have flagged how far things had drifted. Lundgren then layered on an apocalyptic mission: the group, he said, was destined to seize the Kirtland Temple by force and there witness the appearance of Christ. The plan was grandiose and, to outsiders, plainly delusional — but inside the sealed world of the farm, it had become the organizing purpose of everyone's life. Crucially, Lundgren taught that before the prophecy could be fulfilled, the unfaithful among them had to be removed.
The crime: the murder of the Avery family
Lundgren turned that doctrine against the Avery family. Dennis and Cheryl Avery had joined his group with their three daughters, but Lundgren judged them insufficiently obedient and financially uncommitted, and he told his followers that God required their deaths as a "pruning" before the larger mission could proceed. The decision was not a sudden rage; it was planned, rationalized through his teaching, and prepared in advance, down to a pit dug into the dirt floor of the barn.
On the evening of 17 April 1989, the Averys were invited to the farm. One by one, the five of them — Dennis, then Cheryl, then their daughters Trina, Rebecca, and Karen — were taken to the barn, bound, gagged, lowered into the pit, and shot with a handgun. The youngest, Karen, was a small child. The killings were carried out with the participation of several followers, ordinary people who had been led step by step to the point of helping murder a family they knew. Afterward the group buried the bodies in the barn, abandoned the farm, and fled, dispersing toward West Virginia and Missouri. For nine months the Averys' disappearance went unexplained. Then a follower who had broken with Lundgren gave information to authorities, and in early January 1990 police searched the abandoned farm and found the five bodies in the pit. The discovery exposed the murders and unraveled the group.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Five people were murdered: Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their daughters Trina, Rebecca, and Karen, three of them children. They are the heart of this case, and the documented horror is the deliberate, planned killing of a family by people who had been persuaded to obey. Jeffrey Lundgren was convicted of five counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to death; he was executed by lethal injection on 24 October 2006. His wife Alice and son Damon were convicted and received long prison terms, and other followers were sentenced for their roles. No appeal to prophecy reduced the crime to anything other than mass murder.
The case became a reference point in the study of how small, isolated groups can be led to violence, and a fixture in examinations of how cult membership bears on criminal responsibility — defendants argued they had acted under Lundgren's domination, while courts held them accountable for their participation. For the Kirtland community and for the surviving relatives of the Averys, the murders left a permanent wound, and the farm and barn where the family died were later torn down. What endures is not Lundgren's prophecy, which was false and came to nothing, but the memory of the family it was used to destroy.
Lessons
- Be wary of anyone who claims that sacred truth is hidden and that he alone can decode it; secret knowledge concentrates power and disarms the believer's own judgment.
- Treat escalating, graduated demands as the warning they are — control over money, then movement, then conscience — because each concession makes the next, and far worse, easier to extract.
- Recognize apocalyptic urgency as a moral solvent: when a group believes the end is near and depends on its actions, the ordinary limits on behavior can be argued away.
- Watch for isolation, which strips members of the outside voices that would name a plan as monstrous before it is carried out.
- Keep the victims at the center, especially the children, and refuse any framing that lets a leader's claimed revelation obscure the deliberate murder of a family.