Lena Blackmore

Lena Blackmore is the eldest of seven children born to Annie Vandeveer Blackmore and Kenyon Blackmore. Her account gives the family story a perspective distinct from that of her mother: she recalls both her father’s violence during her childhood and the renewed attempts at contact that followed his imprisonment. As an adult, she tries to judge him anew, but his conduct again turns the possibility of reconciliation into conflict.

Family Background

Lena was born nine months after Annie and Kenyon married in December 1959. The couple moved to Provo so Kenyon could attend Brigham Young University; in 1966, after he took a teaching job in Bountiful, he began pressing for plural marriage. Annie could not accept it. Kenyon’s pursuit of Alaire Blackmore, without approval from the local bishop or the prophet in Colorado City, provoked Ray Blackmore, who ordered his sons to drive Kenyon out of town. Alaire was then married to Ray, her adoptive father.

For the next decade and a half, Kenyon moved Annie and their children around western North America, working as a ranch hand, leather worker, and carpenter. Annie later concluded that the children mattered little to him: he would leave for weeks without calling or telling her where he was. This instability forms the background to Lena’s account of a father who exercised power within the family while remaining unreliable in its everyday responsibilities.

Childhood and Recognition

Kenyon physically abused all his children, and Lena was a particular target. When she was eleven, while the family was living in Las Cruces, he punished her severely; she later described having scars from the incident. In her adult account, she said it took until her thirties to understand who her father was. Her judgment was blunt: he was mean and cared about nobody but himself. The delay matters to her story: the harm was not only a childhood experience but something she came to interpret differently with age.

Attempted Reconciliation

After Kenyon was released from prison in late 1991, he returned to Cardston, Alberta, and tried to reunite with Lena, who was then living there. Annie had filed for divorce. Lena made an effort to give her father the benefit of the doubt, but she was uneasy around Gwendolyn Stubbs LeBaron, the wife who had supplanted Annie, and the two children Kenyon and Gwendolyn were raising. Lena objected to their unusual natural-food diet and to Kenyon’s refusal to let them use soap or brush their teeth; she thought the children appeared neglected. Her reservations were concrete, rooted in what she saw in the household, rather than simply in the fact of her father’s second family.

The effort at renewed contact broke down over Lena’s truck. When she faced financial difficulty, Kenyon offered to make the payments and cover the insurance in exchange for using it temporarily. He took the vehicle but did not make the promised payments. Lena learned of the problem when the bank threatened repossession, then contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The police alerted Kenyon’s probation officer, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After learning he was wanted, Kenyon fled south with Gwendolyn and their children to Colonia LeBaron. Lena’s attempt to trust him again thus became the circumstance that exposed his latest breach of trust and prompted another escape.

Her Account of Kenyon’s Beliefs

Lena also interprets the religious circle around her father as part of his transformation. After his release, Kenyon disappeared into Central America with his LeBaron wives, and his religious views grew more extreme. Lena believed the LeBarons encouraged his strange beliefs: in her account, they attributed godlike qualities to him, while he reinforced their own convictions. Her testimony connects his private family conduct to a wider environment in which religious authority and family power could reinforce one another.

That perspective is significant without making Lena a narrator of every event in her father’s later life. She serves instead as a witness to recurring patterns: Kenyon’s neglect and violence, his pursuit of relationships without regard for their effect on his existing family, and the gap between his claims and his obligations. Her return to contact with him does not bring resolution. The truck dispute makes the old pattern newly visible, and his flight leaves the relationship once again defined by his actions and their consequences for others.