Rulon Allred's Apostolic United Brethren

Rulon Allred's Apostolic United Brethren was one of the rival Mormon Fundamentalist organizations formed amid disputes over who held the authority to lead the movement. Allred became its prophet after a contested succession, and the group separated from the Short Creek congregation led by LeRoy Johnson. Though the two communities largely withdrew from one another after the split, the murder of Allred in 1977 exposed the deadly conflicts that could link competing fundamentalist sects.

Origins in a Succession Dispute

After John Y. Barlow died in 1949, leadership passed to Joseph Musser, whom Barlow had respected as an acolyte. Musser soon suffered a series of crippling strokes. He received treatment from Rulon Allred, a naturopath and fellow polygamist, and became increasingly dependent on him.

In 1951, while gravely ill, Musser appointed Allred his second elder and heir apparent. The appointment met strenuous opposition from supporters of LeRoy Johnson, whom Barlow had specified as his preferred successor. The contest was therefore not simply over personal standing: it concerned which claimant could inherit the authority that fundamentalists understood as a continuing line of prophetic leadership.

A Separate Fundamentalist Church

The hostility between Johnson's supporters and Allred's camp divided the movement into rival groups. After Musser died in 1954, Johnson led the larger splinter, which remained in Short Creek and was known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the United Effort Plan. Allred became prophet of the other branch, Rulon Allred's Apostolic United Brethren, based in the Salt Lake Valley, 280 miles north of Short Creek.

The split established distinct centers of religious authority rather than a shared succession. The Short Creek community and Allred's followers had little further involvement with one another, and the Short Creek group generally avoided notice beyond its own community. The Apostolic United Brethren, by contrast, came into wider public view through events surrounding its leader.

Allred's Murder and the LeBaron Connection

On May 10, 1977, Allred was treating patients in his office in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City, when two young women entered, shot him, and walked out. The investigation connected the killers to the LeBaron clan, another breakaway fundamentalist sect founded by Dayer LeBaron, who came from one of the Mormon colonies in Mexico.

The groups had a history of contact. The LeBarons had once maintained a loose association with Allred's faction and had given him refuge in Mexico after he was convicted of polygamy in Utah in 1947 and jumped parole. That earlier connection makes the later killing more than an episode between unrelated groups: it reveals a field of rival organizations whose leaders and followers had intersected even as their claims to religious authority diverged.

Place in the Movement

The Apostolic United Brethren's emergence illustrates how the appeal to prophetic succession could produce institutional division when respected leaders disagreed over who should inherit authority. Musser's appointment of Allred collided with the claim that Johnson had already been designated by Barlow; after Musser's death, neither position reconciled the camps. The result was a lasting split between Allred's organization and the larger Short Creek branch.

The book places that division within a wider pattern of Mormon Fundamentalist groups developing distinct lines of leadership. The Apostolic United Brethren's history is marked both by its origin in a succession conflict and by the violent fate of its prophet, whose earlier ties to the LeBarons did not prevent members of that sect from killing him.