Murray, Utah, enters the narrative as the place where a dispute among rival fundamentalist groups became a public killing. On May 10, 1977, Rulon Allred was treating patients in his office there when two women from the LeBaron clan came in, shot him, and left; the murder made the city a focal point in the movement’s history of division and violence.

Setting and Movement Context

Murray is described as a suburb of Salt Lake City. Allred’s Apostolic United Brethren was based in the Salt Lake Valley, about 280 miles north of Short Creek. The difference in visibility mattered: after the fundamentalist movement split, the Short Creek group kept largely out of view, while Allred’s organization attracted wider attention. His office in Murray was an ordinary place of work and patient care, but it became the setting for an attack that made the divisions between these groups impossible to ignore.

Allred and the LeBaron Connection

Allred had become prophet of the Apostolic United Brethren after a leadership dispute split the movement. The LeBaron clan, founded by Dayer LeBaron, had once maintained a loose association with Allred’s group. The connection was not simply one of rivalry: after Allred was convicted of polygamy in Utah in 1947 and jumped parole, the LeBarons gave him refuge in Mexico for a time. By the time of the Murray killing, that earlier association had given way to lethal opposition. The book identifies the two women who entered Allred’s office as members of the LeBaron clan but does not name them in this account.

The Killing and Its Significance

On the afternoon of May 10, 1977, Allred was seeing patients in his Murray office when the two women entered and shot him dead. They then walked out. The abrupt sequence placed the violence inside a working medical office rather than at a remote settlement or a public confrontation, and linked Murray directly to the widening conflict among fundamentalist sects.

The murder also marked a contrast between the groups’ public profiles. The Short Creek followers were seldom noticed beyond their community, while the Apostolic United Brethren had already drawn attention; Allred’s killing made that exposure more consequential. Murray’s significance in the narrative is therefore not as a center of the movement, but as the place where a personal and institutional rivalry culminated in a nationally notable act of violence.