Ervil LeBaron

Ervil LeBaron was a self-proclaimed prophet whose claim to divine authority became inseparable from rivalry, violence, and revenge. A leading figure in a family of competing religious claimants, he broke with his brother Joel LeBaron and declared that God had authorized Joel’s removal. Ervil’s own death in prison did not close the story: a book he left behind identified people he considered disloyal, and followers later used that list to justify further killings.

Identity and Claims to Authority

Ervil emerged as one of the guiding figures among the LeBaron brothers in the 1960s, alongside the gentler, soft-spoken Joel. He was described as tightly wound, physically imposing, and capable of nursing a grudge. His charisma also drew followers, including women who found him compelling. Ervil imagined a life of extensive plural marriage, aspiring to have twenty-five or thirty wives and to emulate Brigham Young. His personal ambition and prophetic identity were thus bound together: he presented himself as a religious leader while envisioning a large household modeled on an earlier Mormon authority.

Writing was another important part of that identity. Ervil regarded himself as a gifted writer and student of scripture, and he produced religious texts in intensive, prolonged bursts. Rena Chynoweth, who became his thirteenth wife in 1975, recalled that he could write for days at a time, working as much as twenty hours a day and sustaining himself with coffee. The eventual result of this scriptural labor included not only claims about religious truth but also a record of perceived betrayals that would have lethal consequences after his death.

His claim to prophecy arose within a wider conflict over who could speak for God. Mormonism had encouraged personal revelation, but Joseph Smith later restricted the authority to receive commandments for the church to himself. The tension between individual revelation and a prophet’s control of doctrine helped produce repeated schisms. Within Mormon Fundamentalism, competing leaders likewise invoked divine authority and disputed succession. Ervil and Joel both claimed the role of the one mighty and strong, a figure expected to restore the church to righteousness; neither brother’s claim could easily accommodate the other’s.

Rivalry with Joel and the Break

The brothers’ shared prophetic claims made their relationship unstable, despite their very different reputations. Joel was the elder brother and nominal presiding prophet, and his followers regarded him as notably benevolent. Ervil, by contrast, was associated with intensity and resentment. Their rivalry became a decisive rupture in November 1969, when Joel expelled Ervil from the sect for insubordination.

Ervil soon recast the break as a divine judgment. He claimed to have received a revelation that Joel had become an obstacle to God’s work and had to be removed. On August 20, 1972, in Los Molinos, the settlement Joel had founded on the Baja Peninsula, a follower loyal to Ervil shot Joel, killing him. The episode made the brothers’ dispute more than a contest for leadership: a claimed revelation had turned a challenge to authority into a rationale for murder.

The killing began a wider campaign. Ervil initiated a series of religiously justified murders that, through 1975, killed at least five additional people and wounded more than fifteen. The account presents his authority as both personal and organizational: he claimed divine sanction, while followers acted on his directives. His charisma could gather adherents, but the resulting loyalty also made his religious pronouncements a means of directing violence against rivals and people he considered enemies.

Arrest, Release, and Further Killings

In March 1976, Ervil was arrested in Mexico for the crimes and held in a Mexican jail. His confinement did not immediately end his influence. Followers outside the jail continued his work, distributing political pamphlets from a post office box in southern California. The pamphlets denounced taxes, welfare, gun control, and rival polygamists; during Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, Ervil’s subordinates issued a death threat against him because of his liberal views.

Less than a year after his arrest, Ervil was released. The official explanation was insufficient evidence, while the account notes that many believed well-placed bribes had played a part. After his release, he had a disobedient daughter killed and arranged the murder of Rulon Allred. Allred’s followers were a target of Ervil’s ambitions: he coveted their allegiance and hoped to bring them into his own group, the Church of the Lamb of God. Rena Chynoweth, his thirteenth wife, was identified as the person who carried out the shooting of Allred in 1977. The effort to acquire another leader’s followers thus culminated not in a peaceful transfer of authority but in another assassination.

Ervil remained free until 1979, when he was arrested in Mexico again, extradited to the United States, convicted, and sentenced to life in Utah State Prison. He was held in the maximum-security facility at Point of the Mountain, the same prison where Dan Lafferty later resided. By 1981, as he understood that release was unlikely, Ervil became increasingly frantic and irrational. Rena Chynoweth later described his expectation that a miracle would free him and that divine wrath would break down the prison walls, as it had the walls of Jericho. His confidence in supernatural intervention persisted even as his practical prospects narrowed to life behind bars.

Death and the Book He Left Behind

In August 1981, Ervil was found dead in his cell at the age of fifty-six, apparently of a heart attack. Before his death, he had completed The Book of the New Covenants, a rambling, four-hundred-page text directed against people he believed had betrayed him. It listed those he considered disloyal and supplied hostile accounts of what he regarded as each person’s offense. The book functioned as a posthumous hit list: about twenty copies were published, most of them reaching his most devoted followers.

Those followers called themselves the Lambs of God. Many were among Ervil’s fifty-four children, who remained devoted to him after his death. Aaron LeBaron, only thirteen when his father died, led the group. Many of the young people had experienced abuse by older members of the sect and had been abandoned. They resolved to avenge their father by targeting people named in his book. The work of one imprisoned prophet had thereby passed to children who treated his accusations as instructions and his death as a call for retaliation.

Posthumous Violence and Significance

The killings continued according to the logic Ervil had set down. Two people named in the book were assassinated in 1987. On June 27, 1988, three more people on the list and the eight-year-old daughter of one of them were killed in coordinated attacks at separate sites in Texas, about three hundred miles apart. The four killings took place within five minutes of one another and were timed to coincide with the anniversary and approximate hour of Joseph Smith’s death at Carthage Jail. The attackers later claimed responsibility for seventeen deaths altogether and framed the killings as blood atonement sanctioned by God.

The later prosecutions showed that Ervil’s death had not dissolved the group or its capacity for violence. In 1993, two of his sons and one of his daughters received life sentences for involvement in the crimes. Aaron LeBaron was captured in Mexico, extradited to Utah, and sentenced to forty-five years in prison in 1997; the whereabouts of several other offspring who had played lesser roles remained unknown.

Ervil’s story illustrates how a contested prophetic claim could survive its claimant. He first used revelation to turn a struggle with Joel into a mandate for violence; after his death, his writings allowed followers to preserve his grievances as a program of revenge. The book’s account links individual charisma, competition for religious authority, and a succession of followers who treated claimed divine commands as permission to kill. Ervil died in prison, but the list he left behind carried his conflict forward.