Lavina Stubbs LeBaron

Lavina Stubbs LeBaron’s life connects the migration of a fundamentalist Mormon family to Mexico with the private costs of plural marriage, family division, and competing forms of loyalty. As a teenager she left Short Creek with her family, became a plural wife of Prophet Joel LeBaron, and built a life in Colonia LeBaron. After Joel’s death, she endured the loss of her home and savings in a financial scheme involving her son-in-law Kenyon Blackmore, yet continued to help him and her daughter. Her rescue of her granddaughter Evangeline, whom Kenyon had abandoned in Guatemala, marks a later turn toward direct intervention on behalf of the next generation.

From Short Creek to Colonia LeBaron

Lavina spent the first fifteen years of her life in Short Creek, where the Stubbs family name carried considerable standing. Her father’s break with Uncle Roy and conversion to the LeBaron group changed the family’s direction: he moved his children to Mexico, and Lavina arrived at Colonia LeBaron in 1958. She was still a teenager, entering a community shaped by religious migration and by the authority of its leaders. Colonia LeBaron had been established by Dayer LeBaron in 1944, after he said he had received a revelation directing him to buy desert land outside Colonia Juárez. He cleared the land and planted beans; the settlement subsequently became the base of his expanding fundamentalist sect.

The move altered Lavina’s personal prospects as well as her family’s religious setting. Before leaving Short Creek, her mother had wanted her to marry DeLoy Bateman’s father. Lavina recalled that the prophet there directed her toward a man she strongly disliked. Her father’s decision to leave meant that she did not enter that proposed marriage. In her account, the family’s departure was both a rupture with its former community and an escape from a future she did not want.

Marriage to Joel LeBaron and widowhood

In 1959, at sixteen, Lavina became one of Joel LeBaron’s plural wives. She later described their fourteen years together as joyful and remembered Joel as a deeply righteous man. That recollection is important to her account of what followed: she did not describe the marriage simply as a role imposed by a religious system, but as a relationship she valued and a life she believed she had chosen in place of a marriage she feared.

In 1972, Joel was shot dead on the orders of his brother Ervil LeBaron. His death ended the period Lavina remembered as happy and began what she described as a prolonged difficult stretch. The account does not provide a detailed chronology of her life in the years immediately after the killing, but it makes clear that she continued to experience its consequences alongside the later crises surrounding her children and grandchildren. Her grief over Joel’s death gives particular weight to the family’s subsequent entanglement with Kenyon Blackmore, whose marriage to her daughter Gwendolyn would bring further upheaval.

Gwendolyn, Kenyon Blackmore, and financial loss

In 1983, Kenyon Blackmore married Gwendolyn, Lavina and Joel’s twenty-two-year-old daughter. Kenyon was already married to Annie Vandeveer Blackmore, who had been his wife for twenty-four years and did not know about the second marriage. The concealed marriage placed Lavina’s daughter and Annie in a painful family arrangement and joined Lavina’s own household to the wider network around Kenyon.

Lavina also lost a substantial amount of money in a scheme associated with Kenyon. She sold her house and gave him the proceeds, along with her other money; she later said that every cent disappeared. The loss left her without the resources she had entrusted to his program, but she did not initially hold him responsible. She believed that he had meant to benefit those involved and that the investments had gone wrong. Her response distinguishes financial injury from the later grievance that became, for her, more decisive: she said she was not angry over the failed investments, but over Kenyon taking her daughter and grandchildren to Central America and the harm that followed.

The distinction also shows how her loyalties were tested. Kenyon’s actions could injure her directly, yet her first explanation gave him the benefit of the doubt. Her sharper condemnation followed what she understood as the damage done to Gwendolyn and the children. The narrative presents this shift not as a simple reversal of affection, but as a change in what Lavina could accept on behalf of her family.

Shelter and the rescue of Evangeline

When a federal grand jury indicted Kenyon and Bernard Brady in 1983, charging them and nineteen other partners with fraud against thousands of investors, Kenyon went into hiding rather than surrendering. He fled to Mexico, where Gwendolyn and Lavina were waiting to shelter him in Colonia LeBaron. Lavina’s assistance came despite the financial loss she had suffered through his scheme, underscoring the complexity of her response to him. Her help at this point did not prevent her from later blaming him for the suffering of her daughter and grandchildren.

That family upheaval included the experience of Evangeline, Kenyon and Gwendolyn’s daughter. After a period of abuse by her father, Evangeline became pregnant and miscarried. In April 1997, when she was nearly thirteen and had not become pregnant again, Kenyon cast her out in Guatemala. She lived alone for about four months, then stayed with friends after running out of food. After roughly six months, those acquaintances managed to contact Lavina in Colonia LeBaron. Lavina drove to Guatemala and brought her granddaughter to safety.

Evangeline later lived in the American Midwest, where she married and had a son, but remained deeply worried about her younger sisters, who were still with Kenyon somewhere in Central or South America. Lavina’s rescue did not resolve that wider danger, and the account gives no indication that she could protect the other girls. It does, however, record a concrete act of intervention: after years in which family decisions had carried her across borders and into difficult dependencies, she traveled to Guatemala herself to retrieve a granddaughter who had been left without support.

Narrative significance

Lavina’s account is shaped by contrasts that remain unresolved. She treasured her marriage to Joel while recalling the religious authority that had once threatened to direct her toward an unwanted husband. She suffered a serious financial loss through Kenyon yet sheltered him when he fled to Mexico. She initially excused the failed investments but drew a different line when she believed her daughter and grandchildren had been harmed. These are not interchangeable episodes: each reveals a different limit, or endurance, in her loyalty.

Her story also gives the LeBaron family’s migration a domestic scale. Religious settlement and leadership appear not only as movements between Utah and Mexico, but as forces shaping marriage, household security, and the possibilities available to women and children. Lavina is not presented as able to control those forces. She is shown moving within them, making judgments as circumstances change, and at a decisive moment crossing into Guatemala to rescue Evangeline. That journey supplies a clear outcome to one part of her family’s crisis without suggesting that the larger danger had ended.