Kenyon Blackmore

Kenyon Blackmore’s story traces how claims of religious authority became entangled with secrecy and control within his family. His pursuit of plural marriage began in Bountiful, British Columbia, where his first wife, Annie Vandeveer Blackmore, did not share his convictions.

Early family life and conflict

In 1966, Kenyon took a teaching job in Bountiful. Annie had converted to Mormonism after meeting him; she was a farmer’s daughter from Manitoba and knew little about polygamy when they married. Kenyon had told her about his polygamist relatives, but she had not understood that history as a plan for their own household. When he began pressing for plural marriage, Annie tried to approach the issue with an open mind, but could not accept it. Her refusal did not stop him: he pursued Alaire, the adopted daughter of his uncle Ray Blackmore, Bountiful’s presiding bishop. Neither the local bishop nor the prophet in Colorado City had authorized those advances. Ray responded by ordering his sons to drive Kenyon out of town; Alaire was subsequently married to Ray, her adoptive father.

Business ventures and secret marriage

By the early 1980s, Kenyon’s prospects had improved. He moved his family to Salem, Utah, and went into business with Bernard Brady, a Mormon whom he persuaded to adopt fundamentalist beliefs. The two sold shares in tax-sheltered financial trusts and also invested in the Dream Mine, whose workings dominated the mountainside above Salem. Millions of dollars flowed into their business account, and each man bought a lavish home below the mine. Kenyon also made frequent sales trips across western North America to find investors.

In 1983, one such trip took Kenyon to Mexico, where he secretly married Gwendolyn Stubbs LeBaron, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Lavina Stubbs and Joel LeBaron. Joel had been killed in 1972 on the orders of Ervil LeBaron. Kenyon’s new marriage was concealed from Annie, who had already been his wife for twenty-four years. He had not told her that he had taken another wife, and Annie learned of the marriage only after traveling to Mexico in an attempt to persuade him to return to Utah.

The marriage unfolded alongside a major fraud case. In 1983, a federal grand jury indicted Kenyon, Brady, and nineteen other partners on multiple counts of fraud, alleging that they had taken more than $32 million from 3,800 investors. The prosecutor described the scheme as a classic Ponzi scheme. When the indictments came, Brady was arrested, tried, and sentenced to six years in federal prison; Kenyon instead went into hiding and fled to Mexico. Gwendolyn and Lavina sheltered him in Colonia LeBaron.

For Annie, the journey to Mexico brought the secret into view in especially painful circumstances: Kenyon’s second wife was the same age as Annie and Kenyon’s eldest daughter, and had just given birth to a daughter of her own with him. The child, Evangeline, had been born in Colonia LeBaron three days before Dan Lafferty killed Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. Kenyon’s double life thus joined a concealed family relationship to his flight from prosecution, while Annie’s discovery made the consequences of that secrecy immediate within his first household.

Flight, revelations, and family rupture

After returning to Mexico, Kenyon married a third wife, who was Gwendolyn’s half-sister. He soon left Colonia LeBaron with both wives and their children and moved across Central America. In the years that followed, he had four more children with each wife. He supported the growing family through a succession of small-scale occupations and schemes, including odd jobs, selling natural foods, massage work, occasional gold trading, and making saddles and other leather goods in Mexico. Evangeline later described him as a persuasive con artist.

As the family moved between Central American countries, Kenyon said he received revelations identifying him as the last prophet before the return of Jesus Christ. He also claimed that the returning Christ would be born from his own line through Evangeline. In June 1996, on her twelfth birthday, he made her his wife, using his religious claims to justify sexually abusing his daughter. When she resisted, he threatened her with damnation and used force; over time, she yielded passively to avoid further violence.

Evangeline became pregnant after months of abuse, but miscarried two months later. When she did not become pregnant again, Kenyon expelled her in April 1997 and left her in Guatemala, two months short of her thirteenth birthday. She lived alone for about four months, then stayed with acquaintances in Guatemala City after running out of food. Roughly six months after her abandonment, those acquaintances reached her grandmother, Lavina, in Colonia LeBaron, and Lavina drove to Guatemala to bring her to safety.

Religious authority and family power

Kenyon’s trajectory turns on a widening gap between religious authority as a communal structure and authority claimed for himself. In Bountiful, his pursuit of another wife was not sanctioned by the local bishop or the prophet in Colorado City, and it led to his expulsion from town. Later, while moving through Central America, he presented revelations as warrant for his own prophetic status and for decisions affecting his family. The shift is consequential: authority that had once been contested by religious leaders becomes, in his account, a private command that others were expected to accept.

The book places these claims beside a pattern of concealment and instability. Kenyon hid his marriage to Gwendolyn from Annie, went into hiding when indicted in the financial fraud case, and supported his expanding household through irregular work and schemes. His religious claims did not resolve the conflicts within that household; they helped him assert power over it. Evangeline’s eventual abandonment in Guatemala, followed by her grandmother Lavina’s effort to bring her to safety, marks the human consequence of a system in which Kenyon’s asserted authority went largely unchecked within the family. The contrast between his prophetic self-presentation and the circumstances of those around him makes his story less a portrait of religious leadership than an account of authority converted into private control.