Kenyon Blackmore—Annie Vandeveer Blackmore

Kenyon Blackmore and Annie Vandeveer Blackmore’s relationship moved from a courtship begun through correspondence to a marriage fractured by Kenyon’s pursuit of plural wives, concealment, and repeated betrayals of trust. Their history is also embedded in a community where religious marriage and family authority could be organized around male leaders, leaving women and children vulnerable to decisions made without their consent.

Courtship and the First Years of Marriage

Annie and her twin sister first came to Kenyon’s attention through a magazine photograph of the young women on their family’s ranch outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. Kenyon, an avid horseman from a family of western Canadian polygamists, wrote to the sisters and kept up a correspondence with Annie while serving a mission in South Africa. Two years later, after returning, he traveled to Winnipeg to visit them. Six months after that visit, in December 1959, Kenyon and Annie married.

Their first child, Lena Blackmore, was born nine months later. Annie and Kenyon went to Provo so he could attend Brigham Young University, and their family eventually grew to seven children. At the time of their marriage, Annie had converted to Mormonism after meeting Kenyon. Although he told her that some of his relatives practiced polygamy, she did not understand that this background would become a central dispute in their own marriage.

Plural Marriage Becomes a Conflict

In 1966, Kenyon took a teaching job in Bountiful, British Columbia, and began pressing Annie to accept plural marriage. Annie describes herself as having tried to please him and to approach the proposal with an open mind, but she could not agree to it. Her refusal did not end Kenyon’s pursuit of another wife. He aggressively courted Alaire Blackmore, Ray Blackmore’s adopted daughter, although neither Bountiful’s bishop nor the prophet in Colorado City had approved his advances.

Ray responded by ordering his sons to drive Kenyon out of town. Alaire was then married to Ray, her adoptive father. The episode placed Annie’s marital conflict inside a wider family structure in which kinship, religious marriage, and household roles could overlap in bewildering ways. Debbie Palmer, for example, had been married to Ray as a teenager and became a stepmother to his many children, including Alaire, who was older than Debbie. After Ray’s death, Alaire’s marriages connected her in turn to Debbie’s father and to Winston Blackmore, her adoptive brother. These relationships do not describe Annie’s own household, but they show the social world in which Kenyon’s demand for plural marriage took shape.

The broader arrangement also involved more than private marital choices. In the community, men generally had one legal wife, while additional wives were regarded as spiritually married and remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. Religious leaders preached submission and claimed authority over family life. When DeLoy Bateman left the community, a priesthood representative was sent to claim his wives and children for reassignment to another man; his wives refused to go. That episode was not an action against Annie, but it illustrates the institutional assumptions surrounding marriage and family authority in the same world in which Kenyon was pressing Annie to accept a plural household.

A Family Divided by Kenyon’s Choices

For roughly the next fifteen years, Kenyon moved Annie and the children around western North America. He worked as a ranch hand, leather worker, and carpenter, and the family did not stay long in any one place. Annie came to understand that he would leave for weeks without calling or telling her where he had gone. Her account describes a widening distance between a husband who made his own choices and a wife and children left to manage the consequences.

Kenyon was physically abusive toward his children, with Lena singled out for particular severity. When she was eleven, he beat her with a tractor fan belt while the family was living in Las Cruces, New Mexico; she later recalled that the episode left scars. Lena eventually came to see her father as cruel and self-centered, although, by her account, it took until her thirties for her to recognize him that way. Her experience extends the account of the marriage beyond Annie’s refusal of plural marriage: Kenyon’s disregard affected the children as well as his first wife.

A Second Marriage Kept Secret

In 1983, Kenyon married Gwendolyn Stubbs LeBaron, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Joel LeBaron and Lavina Stubbs LeBaron. Annie had then been married to Kenyon for twenty-four years and still did not know that he had taken another wife. Kenyon’s concealment made the disagreement over plural marriage something more than a difference of belief: Annie had not been told that the family arrangement she had refused was already being formed without her knowledge.

Annie discovered the marriage only after traveling to Mexico to persuade Kenyon to return to Utah. In Colonia LeBaron, she learned that Gwendolyn was the same age as Lena and had recently given birth to a daughter, Evangeline Blackmore. The child had been born three days before Dan Lafferty murdered Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. Annie returned home alone, shocked by what she had found, but did not immediately give up on the marriage. In January 1985 she went back to Mexico and again asked Kenyon to come home. This time he agreed.

Arrest and Separation

Kenyon’s return with Annie ended at the border. As soon as he crossed into El Paso, Texas, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested him. A brother-in-law who had invested in Kenyon’s financial scheme had alerted them. Kenyon made a plea bargain with the government and was sent to federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida. Annie’s efforts to bring him back had thus led not to a restored household but to his arrest and imprisonment.

After Kenyon’s release in late 1991, he returned to Cardston, Alberta. By then Annie had given up on the marriage and filed for divorce. Kenyon attempted to reconnect with Lena, but the presence of Gwendolyn and their children made the reunion difficult for her. Lena objected to the way they were raising the children, including their diet and the lack of ordinary hygiene practices. The family’s division was no longer only a dispute between Annie and Kenyon: his second household had become a source of estrangement between him and his eldest daughter as well.

That estrangement deepened when Kenyon took Lena’s truck after promising to make its payments and pay for its insurance. Lena learned of the default only when the bank threatened repossession. She contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who notified Kenyon’s probation officer, and a warrant was issued. Kenyon then fled south with Gwendolyn and their children to Colonia LeBaron. The relationship between Annie and Kenyon ends in the account not with reconciliation, but with a divorce filing, separate households, and further consequences of Kenyon’s decisions reaching their children.