Rulon Allred

Rulon Allred was a naturopath and Mormon fundamentalist whose appointment as Joseph Musser’s successor helped divide the movement into rival sects. His rise rested on personal care as well as competing claims to religious authority: when Musser became gravely ill, Allred treated him, and Musser came to depend on him. Yet the succession provoked fierce opposition, and Allred’s later leadership ended in his murder by members of a breakaway fundamentalist group.

Identity and Background

By the mid-twentieth century, Mormon fundamentalism was organized around rival leaders who claimed authority to preserve religious practices the mainstream Church had abandoned. John Y. Barlow, a staunch polygamist and influential leader, died in 1949. Leadership then passed to Joseph Musser, but Musser soon suffered a series of crippling strokes. Allred, himself a polygamist, was a naturopath who treated him during this period. The account describes Allred as sociable and informal, but the more consequential fact was the dependency that developed between the ill leader and his physician.

Allred had already faced state prosecution. In 1947 he was convicted of polygamy in Utah and jumped parole. The LeBaron family, whose religious group had a loose association with Allred’s circle, gave him refuge in Mexico for a time. That earlier connection would later become significant in a very different way: members of the LeBaron sect would kill him, and Ervil LeBaron would seek to absorb Allred’s followers into his own organization.

The Succession Dispute

As Musser’s health failed, the question of who should lead became a contest over the legitimacy of religious succession. John Y. Barlow had specified before his death that LeRoy Johnson should succeed him as prophet. In 1951, however, Musser appointed Allred his second elder, making him the heir apparent. Musser was gravely ill, and his reliance on the man treating him gave the appointment a close personal context; it did not settle the dispute. Those who expected Johnson to inherit leadership objected strenuously.

The resulting hostility was strong enough to fracture the movement. The disagreement was not merely over a position: the competing camps differed over whose authority could carry forward the fundamentalist community’s religious order. Musser’s choice placed Allred at the center of that conflict, while Johnson’s supporters could appeal to Barlow’s prior designation. The succession therefore exposed a problem built into the movement’s claims of continuing prophetic leadership: rival communities could invoke different lines of authority while each maintained its own right to lead.

A Movement Divided

After Musser died in 1954, Johnson became leader of the larger splinter group, which remained in Short Creek and called itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the United Effort Plan (UEP). Allred became prophet of the other branch, the Apostolic United Brethren, based 280 miles to the north in the Salt Lake Valley. The split gave the two camps distinct leadership and institutional identities, rather than resolving the earlier disagreement within a single movement.

The Short Creek community and Allred’s group had little further involvement with one another after the division. Their paths also differed in visibility: Johnson and his followers largely stayed out of view beyond Short Creek, while the Apostolic United Brethren became associated with a public act of violence. Allred’s position as its prophet thus placed him at the head of one branch of a fractured religious world, but did not insulate him from conflicts among other fundamentalist groups.

Connections to the LeBaron Sect

Allred’s earlier refuge in Mexico linked his history to the LeBaron family before the later violence. The sect, founded by Dayer LeBaron, came from one of the Mormon colonies in Mexico and had once maintained a loose association with Allred’s group. Its members had helped him after his 1947 conviction and flight from parole. The later rupture between those communities makes that earlier assistance an important contrast: a relationship once marked by refuge and association became connected to a lethal attack.

On May 10, 1977, Allred was treating patients at his office in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City, when two young women entered, shot him, and left. They were members of the LeBaron sect. The book also identifies Ervil LeBaron as having arranged Allred’s murder after his release from jail. Ervil coveted Allred’s followers and hoped to bring them into his own group, the Church of the Lamb of God. In this account, Allred’s death was therefore both the killing of a community leader and an attempt to alter the balance of power among competing fundamentalist organizations.

Narrative Significance

Allred’s story brings together two recurring pressures in the book’s account of Mormon fundamentalism: conflict with state law and conflict over who possesses religious authority. His 1947 conviction and flight from parole show the movement’s confrontation with civil law; his appointment, disputed succession, and subsequent leadership show how religious legitimacy could be contested within the movement itself. The same person who had once depended on members of the LeBaron family for refuge later became the target of a sectarian effort to capture his following.

The sequence also distinguishes the movement’s internal divisions from a single, unified opposition to the mainstream Church. After Musser’s death, rival groups formed under Johnson and Allred; later, the LeBaron sect acted against Allred for its own organizational ends. Allred’s career, from physician and designated successor to prophet of a splinter group and victim of a rival sect’s attack, makes the costs of that fragmented authority concrete. His death did not reunite the movement; it marked the violent culmination of a struggle in which leadership, allegiance, and the right to claim a religious inheritance remained divided.