Joel LeBaron

Joel LeBaron was a soft-spoken, amiable fundamentalist leader whose authority rested on both his position in his family’s religious group and his claim to prophetic standing. In the 1960s, he and his brother Ervil LeBaron emerged as the group’s guiding figures, and both claimed the title of one mighty and strong. The contrast between Joel’s reputation for benevolence and the violent fate set in motion by their rivalry gives his story its defining shape: a leader who sought to govern his sect was killed after a brother he expelled asserted that God required his removal.

Identity and Religious Setting

Joel was one of the sons of Dayer LeBaron, whose fundamentalist sect took root at Colonia LeBaron in Mexico. Dayer had established the settlement in 1944 after, according to the account, receiving a revelation directing him to acquire desert land and build a community there. By the 1960s, Joel had become one of the group’s prominent leaders. He was described as amiable and soft-spoken, but his influence was not simply familial: he and Ervil both possessed considerable charisma and presented themselves as divinely authorized prophets.

Their claims belonged to a broader religious tradition in which revelation conferred authority, while competing claims to revelation could unsettle it. Joseph Smith had encouraged individual Mormons to seek personal guidance from God, but later restricted the authority to receive commandments for the church to himself. The persistence of personal revelation nevertheless contributed to the formation of rival Mormon sects. Joel and Ervil’s simultaneous prophetic claims brought that structural conflict into their own family: authority could be asserted through leadership, but it could also be challenged by a rival who claimed direct divine sanction.

Leadership and Rupture with Ervil

Joel was the elder brother and nominal presiding prophet of the LeBaron group. In November 1969, he expelled Ervil from the sect for insubordination. The decision was the beginning of the terminal rupture between them. Their conflict was not merely a disagreement between siblings: both claimed prophetic authority, and their followers stood within a movement where a leader’s religious legitimacy could determine who was entitled to direct the faithful.

After the expulsion, Ervil received a revelation that recast Joel as an obstacle to God’s work and called for his removal. The book describes Joel as an uncommonly benevolent man, and says his followers routinely regarded him as saintlike. That reputation did not protect him from the authority Ervil claimed through revelation. The conflict thus turned on incompatible accounts of divine will: Joel had exercised his standing as presiding prophet by expelling his brother, while Ervil’s revelation portrayed Joel’s continued leadership as a barrier to the work of God.

Murder at Los Molinos

On August 20, 1972, Joel was shot and killed in Los Molinos, the polygamist settlement he had established on the Baja Peninsula eight years earlier. The attacker was a member of the group loyal to Ervil. The killing made the consequences of the brothers’ struggle immediate and irreversible: the expelled brother’s religious claim had become a justification for lethal action against the leader who had removed him.

Joel’s death was part of a larger campaign of violence directed by Ervil. After ordering Joel’s killing, Ervil initiated a series of murders that killed at least five more people through 1975 and wounded more than fifteen. The sequence places Joel’s murder at the beginning of an expanding pattern, rather than as an isolated act of family conflict. Ervil later sought followers who might otherwise have belonged to rival leaders, including Rulon Allred, and his group’s ambitions continued to turn religious competition into mortal danger.

Marriage to Lavina and the Aftermath

Joel’s marriage to Lavina Stubbs LeBaron connected his leadership to the upheavals of another fundamentalist community. Lavina had moved to Colonia LeBaron in 1958, after spending her first fifteen years in Short Creek. Her family left after her father broke with LeRoy Johnson and joined the LeBaron group. A year later, when Lavina was sixteen, she became one of Joel’s plural wives.

Lavina later remembered her fourteen years of marriage to Joel as joyful and described him as deeply righteous. Before her family left Short Creek, her mother had wanted her to marry DeLoy Bateman’s father; Lavina recalled that she had nearly been forced into a marriage with a man she could not stand. She understood her family’s move to Mexico, and her marriage to Joel, as an escape from that prospect. Her account makes Joel more than a rival prophet in a succession struggle: he was also the husband with whom she associated a period of happiness and a life she believed she had been fortunate to enter.

Joel’s killing ended that period. Lavina’s life thereafter entered an extended difficult stretch, and she attributed much of her heartache to Kenyon Blackmore, who married her and Joel’s daughter Gwendolyn in 1983. That later marriage and its effects belong to the continuing history of the LeBaron family, but the loss at its beginning was Joel’s death. For Lavina, his murder was not only the violent end of a religious leader’s career; it altered the course of her family life for years afterward.

Narrative Role and Significance

Joel’s story shows how a claim to prophetic authority could become both a means of organizing a community and a source of division within it. He was a charismatic leader, a husband remembered with affection, and the presiding figure who used his authority to expel Ervil. Ervil answered that act with a rival revelation and a lethal command. The resulting reversal is central to Joel’s significance: the same religious language through which leaders claimed legitimacy could be turned against them when a competing prophet declared that God had withdrawn their right to lead.

The book places Joel’s murder within the recurring fragmentation of Mormon fundamentalist movements, where succession and revelation repeatedly produced rival groups. His death made that pattern concrete. In Los Molinos, the dispute over who could speak for God did not end with a change of leadership or a peaceful separation; it ended with the killing of the man Ervil had been expelled by, and opened a broader campaign of violence.