Kenyon Blackmore—Gwendolyn Stubbs LeBaron

Kenyon Blackmore and Gwendolyn Stubbs LeBaron’s relationship began as a secret plural marriage and became the center of a family upheaval that followed them from Mexico across Central America. Kenyon concealed the marriage from his first wife, Annie Vandeveer Blackmore; after he fled fraud charges, Gwendolyn and her mother, Lavina Stubbs LeBaron, sheltered him. Their household later moved repeatedly, and Kenyon’s escalating religious claims brought grave consequences for the children around them.

Background and formation

Gwendolyn was the daughter of Lavina Stubbs LeBaron and Joel LeBaron, a leader of the LeBaron fundamentalist group. Lavina had moved as a teenager from Short Creek to Colonia LeBaron, where she became Joel’s plural wife at sixteen. She later described their fourteen years together as joyful and regarded Joel as a righteous man. In 1972, Joel was killed on the orders of his brother Ervil LeBaron, leaving Lavina and her family to live with the aftermath of his death.

Kenyon’s own family life was already marked by plural marriage and concealed relationships. He had been married to Annie for twenty-four years when he took Gwendolyn as a second wife, but he did not tell Annie. The secrecy was not simply a disagreement between spouses: it kept Annie from knowing that her husband had formed another household and had fathered a child with Gwendolyn. Their relationship thus began within an uneven distribution of knowledge, with Kenyon deciding what each family member was permitted to know.

The secret marriage and flight to Mexico

In the early 1980s, Kenyon moved his family to Salem in Utah County and entered a business partnership with Bernard Brady. The two men sold shares in tax-sheltered financial trusts and also invested in the Dream Mine. During a sales trip to Mexico in 1983, Kenyon secretly married Gwendolyn, then twenty-two, the daughter of Lavina and the late Joel LeBaron. At the time, he was still living a married life with Annie in Canada. The new marriage therefore joined Kenyon to the LeBaron family while remaining hidden from his first wife.

The business venture soon collapsed into a legal crisis. A federal grand jury indicted Kenyon, Bernard Brady, and other partners on fraud charges involving more than thirty-two million dollars from thousands of investors. Brady was arrested and later imprisoned; Kenyon went into hiding instead of surrendering. He ran to Mexico, where Gwendolyn and Lavina sheltered him at Colonia LeBaron. His reliance on Gwendolyn’s family for refuge made the marriage a practical alliance as well as a religious one, even as his concealment of it from Annie continued.

Annie learned about Gwendolyn only after traveling to Mexico to persuade Kenyon to return to Utah. There she discovered that he had taken a wife who was the same age as their oldest daughter, Lena, and that Gwendolyn had recently given birth to a daughter, Evangeline. The child had been born three days before Dan Lafferty murdered Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. Annie returned to Utah alone, shocked by what she had found, but later went back to Mexico and again asked Kenyon to come home. This time he agreed. When he crossed into El Paso, FBI agents arrested him; after entering a plea bargain, he was incarcerated in federal prison.

Return, renewed flight, and the growing household

Kenyon was released in late 1991 and returned to Cardston, Alberta. By then Annie had filed for divorce. Kenyon tried to reconnect with Lena, but she was uneasy around Gwendolyn and the two children Gwendolyn had had with him. Lena also objected to the way Kenyon and Gwendolyn were raising those children, including their unusual diet and lack of ordinary hygiene practices. Her account shows that the effects of the marriage extended beyond the adults: the children’s care and family relationships became part of the conflict that divided Kenyon from his first household.

A dispute over Lena’s truck ended the attempted return. Kenyon had promised to make its payments and cover its insurance in exchange for using it, but Lena learned that he had not paid and faced the possibility of repossession. She contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who alerted Kenyon’s probation officer; a warrant was issued. Kenyon again fled with Gwendolyn and their children to Colonia LeBaron. The sequence repeated the earlier pattern: when the law closed in, he relied on the Mexican refuge and the family life he had established with Gwendolyn.

Back in Mexico, Kenyon married a third wife, who was Gwendolyn’s half sister. He soon left Colonia LeBaron with both wives and all their children, traveling across Central America. Over the following years he had four more children with each wife and supported the enlarged group through a succession of jobs and small-scale schemes. Gwendolyn’s marriage to Kenyon had thus expanded into a mobile plural household whose practical survival depended on unstable work and whose members were repeatedly carried away from established communities.

Religious claims and consequences

After prison, Kenyon’s religious views became more extreme. Lena believed the LeBarons encouraged his unusual beliefs and that he, in turn, reinforced theirs. While traveling with his wives and children, Kenyon claimed through revelations that he was the last prophet before the return of Jesus Christ. His claims did not remain abstract: he asserted that the returning Christ would be born through his own family, and in 1996 he took his daughter Evangeline as a wife when she was twelve. The evidence describes this as sexual abuse. It records the consequence within the family without suggesting that Gwendolyn directed or approved Kenyon’s actions.

The relationship’s significance lies in how secrecy, religious marriage, flight, and family dependence became joined. Kenyon’s concealed marriage humiliated Annie and unsettled Lena; his later arrests and flight repeatedly displaced Gwendolyn and the children; and the household’s religious claims culminated in harm to a daughter. Gwendolyn’s role in the account is principally that of Kenyon’s second wife and a member of the family that sheltered him, traveled with him, and lived through the consequences of his choices. The narrative does not provide her own account of the marriage, so it does not establish her private motives or feelings beyond the actions and circumstances it records.