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The Dark Legacy of Cult Leader Ervil LeBaron · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine it is exactly 4 p.m. on a sweltering Tuesday. Okay.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: June 27th, 1988. And across three completely different cities in Texas,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: which are, you know, miles and miles apart, gunmen simultaneously
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: raise their weapons.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: And they pull the trigger. They execute their targets at
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: the exact same second. And there are no cell phones.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no GPS.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: No encrypted messaging apps, nothing. Just synchronized watches. This happens.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Absolute terrifying obedience. And a hit list written by a
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: man who had already been dead for seven years.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, it literally sounds like the climax of an
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: espionage thriller.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: The kind of coordinated, multi-state assassination plot you'd expect from
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: a highly trained, state-sponsored intelligence agency.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Right, or like a massive international crime syndicate.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Exactly. But this wasn't the KGB, and it wasn't the
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: mafia either. This military-style operation was carried out by a splintered,
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: incredibly impoverished religious cult.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome to this deep dive. We are taking you into
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: the just harrowing, multi-generational true story of Ervil Morell LeBaron.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: The man the media later dubbed the Mormon Manson.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And using some really extensive documentation, including the
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: accounts detailed in a People magazine article. surrounding the documentary
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Daughters of the Cult. Our mission today is to completely
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: deconstruct the mechanics of total authoritarian control.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Because we aren't just looking at what happened here. Right.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: We're dissecting how. Like, how does one man orchestrate dozens
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: of murders, even from beyond the grave? Yeah. And what
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: happens to the minds of the people who are just
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: trapped inside that kind of extreme ideological isolation? Yeah.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Because that is really the core stakes of this narrative
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: for you listening. I mean, it's easy to look at
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: a true crime story and just view it as a
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: bizarre anomaly, right?
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, for sure.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: But if you look closer, this is an absolute masterclass
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: in the weaponization of belief. We're going to examine how
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: insular communities can just systematically dismantle a person's grip on reality. Right.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: And by understanding the specific levers of manipulation that Urval
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: LeBaron pulled, you gain this crucial understanding of groupthink and
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: the psychology of influence, and really the ultimate cost of
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: unquestioned authority in literally any system.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: Look, I know we are dealing with some incredibly dark
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: material today, but understanding the architecture of a cult gives
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: you the tools to recognize those exact same red flags
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: in everyday life.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, whether it's a toxic workplace or an abusive relationship or,
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: you know, an extreme political fringe, The mechanics of control
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: are surprisingly universal.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: They really are. And to really understand those mechanics, we
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: have to start long before the four o'clock murders.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Right. We have to look at the actual environment that
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: incubated Ervil the Baron. Because you don't just, you know,
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: wake up one day and decide to build a murderous,
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: isolated empire. No.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: You have to be geographically and ideologically primed for it.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: So let's trace this back. I know Ervil wasn't even
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: born until 1925. But the roots of his isolation actually
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: start decades earlier.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Like back in 1890. Yeah.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: That is the critical fracture point. So in 1890, the
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially banned
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: the practice of plural marriage. Right.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Which for the vast majority of members was just a
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: settled issue.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They accepted the mandate. They assimilated into broader American
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: societal norms and they just moved forward.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: But we're focusing on the fraction of a fraction who
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: absolutely refused to let it go. including Ervil's father, Alma
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: de Ola Baron.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: And Alma's response to the 1890 mandate is really where
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: the physical and the ideological isolation begins. Because instead of assimilating,
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: he decides to completely remove his family from the jurisdiction
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: of the main church and, more importantly, from the jurisdiction
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: of the United States. So in the early 1920s, he
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: takes his two wives and their 11 children and they
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: move south across the border to the Galeana municipality in
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: northern Mexico.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: I want to pause on that migration for a second.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Because moving your family to the remote Mexican desert in
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the 1920s isn't just a change of scenery.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: No, not at all.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: It's an intentional severing of the societal feedback loop.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: Precisely. If you stay in the U.S. and practice something illegal,
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: you're constantly bumping up against law enforcement.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: You're bumping against neighbors, against the public school system. There
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: is friction. Yeah.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Friction is a great word for it.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: By moving to an isolated colony in northern Mexico, Alma
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: wasn't just finding a place to practice his beliefs. He
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: was building a complete vacuum. He completely removed the friction.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: So Ervil was born into this vacuum in 1925. He
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: grows up in this environment where the only reality is
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: his father's fundamentalist colony.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: He and his brother Joel are raised in this very specific,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: incredibly narrow worldview. And they even briefly try to join
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: the mainstream LDS church at one point, right?
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they do, but that doesn't stick.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: At all.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: The splintering just keeps happening. Joel eventually breaks off and
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: founds his own sect, and he calls it the Church
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Time.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: That is quite the name.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: It really is. And Ervil is right there with him.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: And this is where the sociology of these splinter groups
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: becomes so fascinating to me. Because Joel tries to establish
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: his church, but Ervil is not built to be a follower.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: Not at all. Ervil is this massive, imposing figure. He's 6'8.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Which is huge. Huge.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: And he has never held a traditional paying job in
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: his entire life. So instead of supporting his brother, he
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: just starts preaching his own prophecies.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: And he doesn't stop at just preaching. The accounts from
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: his own children detail how Ervil started essentially taking other
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: men's wives within the colony.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he's asserting total dominance. Not just spiritually, but physically
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: and socially.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Which obviously forces Jules' hand. I mean, you cannot run
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: a functioning community if your brother is acting as a
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: rogue agent, usurping your authority and destroying families.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: No, you can't. No. So Joel excommunicates Ervil. He kicks
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: him out of the church.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: No. In a normal society, getting kicked out of your
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: community might force a moment of self-reflection.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: You'd hope so.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Right. But in this hyper-isolated world, Ervil just doubles down.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: He takes a faction of followers who are loyal to him.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: He breaks away from Joel, and he forms his own sect,
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: the Church of the Lamb of God.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: And think about the mechanical process of what just happened there.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: Every time they splinter, they are turning the dial on
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: a combination lock.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Oh, I like that analogy.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: They're clicking themselves further and further away from objective reality.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: They went from the U.S. to Mexico, then from the
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: mainstream church to the father's fundamentalist colony, from the father's
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: colony to Joel's church, and finally from Joel's church to
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Ervil's personal faction.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: It's an ideological echo chamber. completely sealed off from the
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: outside world. It's almost like a fractal of extremism, like
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: a Matryoshka doll of isolation, where every layer you open
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: gets smaller, darker, and more detached from reality.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: But I'm looking at this timeline, and I'm struggling with
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: the motivation here. At what point does a religious offshoot
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: stop being about theology and start being purely about one
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: man's ego?
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: Well, that's the defining trait of charismatic authoritarianism. The ideology
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: is malleable, but the power is absolute.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Ervil didn't leave Joel's church over some nuanced debate about scripture.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: He left because Joel told him to stop taking people's wives. Right.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: To fall in line.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: Exactly. So Ervil's new church was fundamentally built on a
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: foundation of his own bruised ego. He needed a system
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: where his impulses, no matter how destructive or selfish they were,
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: were entirely unquestionable.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: So let's look at the actual architecture of that system.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: We know he built this echo chamber, but how do
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: you practically control dozens of people day in and day out?
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: It's a massive logistical challenge.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Because this year's scale of his family is staggering. He
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: had at least 13 wives. His daughter, Anna, actually believed
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: it was 14. Yeah. And well over 50 children.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Including 11 stepchildren from women who were previously married. The
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: erasure of individual identity in a group that large is
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: entirely systematic.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: How so?
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Well, his son Hiram noted that nobody even knows the
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: exact number of siblings. He famously said, polygamist math is hard.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: When you don't even know exactly how many siblings you have,
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: you are no longer an individual. You are just a
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: node in a chaotic, overwhelming network.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: And the daily reality of that network is just bleak.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: We are talking extreme, grinding poverty. They lived like fugitives
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: bouncing around, constantly evading law enforcement. There was no running water.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: They were bathing in galvanized tubs once a week. No electricity.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Kids are running around without shoes.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: And their method of getting clothes is a perfect example
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: of their relationship with the outside world. They engaged in
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: a practice they called gift boxing.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Which is a very sanitized, polite-sounding term for what it
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: actually was. Exactly.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: It meant crossing the border to break into charity donation
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: bins and steal used clothes. They are literally scavenging off
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: the surplus of the society they are hiding from.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: That's wild.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: And when they were living in the States, if Ervil
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: came to visit the family, the kids had to scramble
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: to cover all the windows so the authorities wouldn't spot him.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Now, look at that through the lens of psychological control.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Keeping your followers exhausted and impoverished is not an accident.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: No, it's a highly effective active weapon. If a mother
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: is constantly worried about where her children's next meal is
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: coming from, she doesn't have the energy to rebel. And
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: if a child is spending all their energy just trying
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: to survive without basic sanitation. they simply do not have
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: the cognitive bandwidth to question the theology.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: But wait, hold on. I'm struggling with this part. You
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: have these kids crossing into the U.S. to steal clothes
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: from donation bins. They are out in the world, however briefly.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: You see paved roads, normal houses, people with shoes. Why
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: didn't the older kids just I don't know, run away.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Why go back to the compound?
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: Because physical proximity to the outside world means nothing when
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: your psychological borders are that fortified.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: What do you mean?
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: You have to understand trauma bonding. To those children, the
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: outside world wasn't a sanctuary. It was the enemy. Ervil
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: had conditioned them to believe that the outside world was
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: fundamentally evil, corrupt, and incredibly dangerous.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Yes. They were suffering in the cult, but it was
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: a familiar suffering. Running away means stepping into a void
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: where you genuinely believe your soul will be damned and
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: you will be utterly alone.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: So it's not a church at all. It's essentially a
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: corporate shell game, using his own family as expendable assets.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Because they also set up this business called Michael's Appliances.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: And on the surface, it looks like a mundane repair shop.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: But in reality, it's just a front to funnel cash
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: directly into Ervil's pockets.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: And the labor practices there were horrific. Young boys were
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: doing the heavy, dangerous repair work on these appliances. The
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: girls were scrubbing and cleaning them.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, his daughter Celia detailed how she was working 12-hour
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: shifts starting at the age of nine.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Nine years old. Working a 12-hour day to fund a
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: prophet who refuses to hold a job.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: And this child labor is enforced by pure terror. Ervil
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: had a right-hand man, an enforcer named Dan Jordan.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Dan Jordan.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Dan was essentially the warden of these kids. He berated them.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: He terrified them. And he enforced total compliance. Hiram recalled
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: being beaten relentlessly just for minor infractions or perceived disobedience
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: to his father's teachings.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: So you have a population that is physically exhausted from
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: manual labor, nutritionally deprived, entirely dependent on the leader for
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: their survival, and kept in a constant state of hypervigilance
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: due to the threat of physical violence from men like
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Dan Jordan.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Which brings up a massive paradox. His daughter, A.D. Marks,
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: asked the most heartbreaking, logical question as she looked back
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: on her childhood.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: What did she say?
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: She said, if we were so chosen, why were we
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: suffering so badly?
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, if they are the divine elite of the earth,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: why are they eating out of the garbage?
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Inside a closed authoritarian system, that cognitive dissonance is resolved
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: by reframing the suffering. The abuser convinces the victims that
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: the suffering is a test of their fate. Right.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Like it makes them holy.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It's the necessary price of being pure in a
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: wicked world. Ervil wasn't providing spiritual salvation. He was running
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: an extraction operation.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: But as long as he could keep his family convinced
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: that their pain was holy, he could wring them dry
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: for labor and money without facing a revolt.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: So you have this powder keg of impoverished, terrified, exhausted people.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: But fear and exhaustion only keep people in line for
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: so long before the system breaks down or they snap.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Ervil couldn't just keep them as passive victims of abuse.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: He had to give them a reason to direct that
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: violence outward. How did he shift them from being victims
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: to actively becoming predators?
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: You do that by weaponizing the most sacred elements of
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: their belief system. You take their genuine desire to be righteous,
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: and you twist it into a justification for extreme violence.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: And Ervil achieved this by reviving and heavily preaching a
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: fringe historical concept known as blood atonement.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Let's unpack the mechanics of that. Because the way Ervil
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: preached it, blood atonement was the idea that some sins
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: are so grievous, so offensive to God, that standard repentance
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: isn't enough. Right. The sinner has to literally shed their
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: own blood. They have to die in order for God
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: to forgive them.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: And it is so vital to note that he was
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: twisting a very old, obscure pioneer era concept, one that
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: the mainstream LDS church completely and unequivocally rejected long ago.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Right. We want to be very clear about that distinction.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: The mainstream church teaches the infinite atonement of Jesus Christ.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly. But in Ervil's isolated reality, far away from any
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: mainstream theological correction, he dug up this concept, dusted it off,
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: and fully weaponized it.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: He claimed he was receiving direct revelations from God. And, shockingly,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: these divine messages perfectly aligned with Ervil's personal desires.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: How convenient. Right.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: God told him to marry underage girls. And God told
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: him that anyone who challenged his authority needed to be blood-atoned.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: He took a theological concept and turned it into a
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: mafia hit list.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: Which completely changes the psychology of the followers. When he
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: targets someone, he is absolving his followers of moral guilt.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: He's telling them, you are not committing cold-blooded murder. You
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: are acting as the righteous instrument of God's justice. You
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: are saving their soul by killing them.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: And his first major target under this new divine hit
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: list is his own brother, Joel.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: The brother who excommunicated him.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Ervil decrees that Joel has to die because he
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: disobeyed the one true mighty prophet.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: The assassination of Joel in August 1972 is chilling in
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: its intimacy and brutality. Ervil sends his enforcer, Dan Jordan,
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: along with another henchman. They lure Joel to an abandoned
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: shack and they don't just shoot him from a distance.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: They corner him, beat him savagely with a chair leg,
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: and then Dan Jordan shoots him to death.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Now, Ervil actually gets arrested for this. He is tried
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: and convicted of Joel's murder in a Mexican court in 1974. Yeah.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: And you would think this is the moment the cult shatters,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the leaders behind bars. But then in just a massive
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: failure of the justice system, his conviction is overturned on
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: appeal and he is released.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: And think about the psychological impact of that release on
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: his followers. They are already primed to believe he is
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: a divine figure.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: When he is locked in a prison and then miraculously freed,
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: it doesn't look like a legal loophole to them. It
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: looks like divine intervention.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: It's proof.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: It proves to them that Ervil is untouchable, that the
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: laws of man cannot hold the prophet of God.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: It emboldens him completely. Because almost immediately after he gets out,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: the violence escalates from targeted assassination to outright terrorism.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it does.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: He sets his sights on his other brother, Verlin, who
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: had taken over Joel's colony in Los Melinos. Verlin is
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: so terrified of Ervil that he actually flees the country.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: He's hiding out in Nicaragua.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: But in December 1974, Ervil decides to attack the entire
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: town anyway.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: It was a coordinated military-style ambush. Ervil's followers roll into
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Los Melinos at night. They set a fire in a
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: central tower specifically to draw the community out of their homes.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: That's terrifying.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: And when the people rush out to extinguish the flames,
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: Ervil's men open fire on them from the darkness.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: They use firebombs, Molotov cocktails, automatic weapons. They burn down
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: scores of buildings. Two men are killed in the chaos
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: and 19 people are injured. It is a massacre.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: And we have to look closely at who is pulling
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: those triggers. Accounts from the survivors detail how Ervil and
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Dan Jordan had been arming the children in their own colony.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: They were training them to fire machine guns.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: That is the part that stops me cold. You are
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: a child. You have been raised in grinding dirt poverty.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: You have never known anything outside this group. And your
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: father figure hands you an automatic weapon and tells you
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: to fire upon a rival town.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: I just have to wonder how much of their obedience
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: at that point is actual religious fervor and how much
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: is just raw primal survival instinct. If you watch your
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: uncle get beaten and shot... and you see a whole
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: town firebombed, you know exactly what happens if you refuse
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: an order.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: The line between religious belief and survival instinct completely dissolves
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: in that environment. Trauma bonding under the threat of lethal
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: violence entirely rewires the brain. You align with the primary
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: source of power in your environment because your nervous system
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: demands it to stay alive. To question Ervil isn't just
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: a crisis of faith. It is a literal death sentence.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: You adopt his reality because the alternative is being the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: next target. Exactly. And as Ervil's paranoia and his megalomania grow,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: the borders of his violence start to expand. He can't
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: just contain his hits to his own family or the
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: isolated colonies in Mexico. He starts looking outward.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: He needs to assert his dominance over the broader fundamentalist landscape. Right.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: Which leads us to the assassination of a man named
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: Rulon Allred.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So Rulon Allred was a prominent naturopathic physician, and he
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: was the leader of a massive, entirely separate polygamist Mormon
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: sect headquartered in Utah.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: Ervil viewed Allred not just as a rival, but as
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: a direct threat to his own claim of supreme authority.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: If Allred had thousands of followers, Ervil wanted them.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: But Ervil doesn't send Dan Jordan or his hardened henchmen
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: to do this job. He sends two young women, his
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: stepdaughter Ramona Marsden. and his youngest wife, a teenager named
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Rena Chynoweth.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: I want to spend some time on Rena, because her
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: story is the absolute epicenter of how Ervil locked the
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: psychological doors on his followers.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Rena's trajectory is just devastating. Ervil began actively pursuing her
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: when she was just 12 years old.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Twelve.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: By her own later admission, she had absolutely no romantic
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: interest in him. She was repulsed by the idea. But
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: she had been raised to believe he was the literal
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: mouthpiece of God.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: So Ervil uses the ultimate threat. He corners this young
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: girl and tells her that if she refuses to marry him,
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: she is defying God and she will burn in hell
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: for eternity.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: He leverages her own soul against her.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: He forces her into marriage before she even turns 18.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: He marries a child under the threat of eternal damnation.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: And then he decides to turn her into a hitman.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: In May 1977, Rina and Ramona are dispatched to Allred's
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: medical office in Murray, Utah. And the preparation is meticulous.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: They are outfitted in elaborate disguises, cheap wigs, oversized sunglasses,
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: bulky coats to hide their figures and the weapons.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: They walk into the waiting room of this busy medical practice.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: Rina pulls out a handgun and opens fire. She shoots
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Allred multiple times.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: Just absolute chaos in that room.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: The sheer panic. Rina and Ramona run out the door
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: to escape, but Ervil had drilled into them that they
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: had to be absolutely certain the target was dead. So
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Rina actually stops, turns around, runs back into the clinic,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: walks up to Allred's body, and shoots him again directly
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: in the face.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: My God.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: She fired seven rounds in total. Ramona was supposed to
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: be the backup shooter, but she completely frozen couldn't pull
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: the trigger.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: The cruelty of this plot goes even deeper when you
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: realize the strategic motive behind it. According to later testimony
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: from Ervil's niece, Donna Goldberg, Allred wasn't even the ultimate target.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: Wait, really?
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Allred's murder was bait. Ervil knew that his brother Verlin,
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: the one hiding in Nicaragua, would feel obligated to return
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: to Utah to attend Allred's funeral. Oh, wow. Ervil sent
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: heavily armed gunmen with automatic rifles to that funeral to
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: assassinate Verlin amidst the mourners.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: It is genuinely diabolical. You assassinate a high-profile religious leader
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: purely to flush your brother out of hiding so you
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: can murder him at a funeral?
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: And the only reason Verlin survived is because the police
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: anticipated trouble and flooded the funeral with plainclothes officers.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Thank goodness.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: Ervil's gunmen got spooked by the heavy police presence and
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: aborted the mission. And then they spent weeks terrified Ervil
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: was going to kill them for failing.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: But we have to return to what Ervil did to
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: Rena in that medical office. Why send a teenage girl
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: to do a cartel-style hit?
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: Well, in gang culture, this tactic is called blooding. You
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: force a peripheral or vulnerable member of your group to
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: commit a heinous, highly public crime. You make them entirely complicit.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: That is the mechanical lock I'm talking about. It's like
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: burning the only bridge while you are standing on the
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: other side. With the person you are trapping.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: By forcing Rena to pull that trigger, he severs her
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: moral and legal ties to the outside world. She isn't
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: just a victim of a cult anymore. In the eyes
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: of the law, she is a cold-blooded murderer.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Exactly. If she escapes the cult and goes to the
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: police to report Ervil's abuse, she is confessing to a
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: capital crime. She will go to prison for life. Right.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: Ervil manufactured a scenario where her only physical and psychological
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: refuge was inside the very cult that was abusing her.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: He became her only safe harbor because he was the
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: only one telling her that what she did was a righteous,
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: holy act.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate psychological prison. And shockingly, initially it works.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: Rina and Ramona flee back across the border to Mexico.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: They are eventually tracked down and stand trial in Utah
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: in 1979.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: But because of the chaos, the wigs, the sunglasses, the
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: witnesses in the clinic couldn't positively identify Rena. She sits
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: on the stand, lies under oath, denies everything, and a
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: jury acquits her. She walks free.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: Though she later fully confessed to the entire assassination in
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: a memoir she wrote called The Blood Covenant and corroborated
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: it in the civil court depositions. But while all this
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: international attention is focused on the Allred assassination, the internal
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: purges inside the cult are still raging. Ervil's paranoia is absolute.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody is safe, not even his inner circle. Another
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: one of his wives, Vonda White, murders a man named
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: Dean Grover Vest.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Vest was actually one of Ervil's personal bodyguards, but he
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: was quietly planning to defect and leave the church. Ervil
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: finds out. So, Vonda White calmly walks up behind Vest
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: while he is washing his hands at his sink, and
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: she shoots him three times in the back. She eventually
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: receives a life sentence for it.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: The blood is just flowing across state lines and international borders. Rivals,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: family members, defectors, anyone who poses even a theoretical threat
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: to Ervil's absolute supremacy is eliminated.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: But eventually, the law of averages catches up with him.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: The Mexican authorities apprehend Ervil in 1979. They extradite him
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: to Utah, where he is put on trial for orchestrating
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: the murder of Rulon Allred.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: In 1980, he is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: And historically, in the life cycle of most cults, this
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: is the final chapter. You cut off the head of
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: the snake, the charisma is removed from the system, the
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: echo chamber fractures, and the followers slowly dissipate. But Ervil
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: LeBaron had built something far more insidious. Removing his physical
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: presence did not dismantle the machinery of control he had engineered.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: So Ervil dies in the Utah State Prison on August 16, 1981.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: He's only 56 years old. And there is a bizarre
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: amount of mystery surrounding exactly how his heart stopped beating.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: The official accounts are incredibly fractured. He was found dead
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: in his maximum security cell. Initial reports suggested suicide. Guards
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: found a note next to him that simply read, I've
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: gone to meet my maker.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Creepy.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: There were theories that he had formed a suicide pact
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: with a female follower he was corresponding with, or that
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: he had somehow managed to strike himself in the throat
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: to induce suffocation or perhaps overdosed. Wow. But later media
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: reports contradicted this, citing natural causes like a massive heart
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: attack or a fatal seizure.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: But honestly, how he died is entirely secondary to what
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: he left behind in that cell. Because Ervold didn't spend
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: his final months in prison reflecting on his sins. He
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: spent them writing.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: He produced a 400-page rambling, terrifying manifesto that he titled
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: The Book of the New Covenants.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: And it was not a theological text. It was a
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: meticulously detailed text. deeply paranoid hit list.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: A hit list.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: He named defectors, former allies who had abandoned him, rival leaders.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: He even named the prosecutor who put him away, David Yoakam,
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: and reportedly even high-profile political figures like former President Jimmy Carter.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Now, if a normal inmate writes a 400-page manifesto demanding
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: the death of the president, it goes into an evidence
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: box and everyone moves on.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: But Ervil's son, Aaron LeBaron, steps up to take control
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: of the church after Ervil's death. And Aaron does not
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: view this manifesto as the rantings of a dying, bitter narcissist.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: Aaron views it as the sacred, immutable, divine word of God.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: This is the phenomenon of charismatic authority surviving past the grave.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: Ervil had so thoroughly conditioned his followers that his written
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: word held the exact same terrifying weight as his physical presence.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: The manifesto essentially became a dead man's switch.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: And it takes a few years for the bomb to
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: fully detonate, but when it does, it is unprecedented. In
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: October 1987, Dan Jordan, the enforcer who murdered Joel and
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: terrified the children at the appliance shop, is found murdered.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: He was on the list.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: But the true execution of Ervil's final will happens on
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: June 27, 1988. The four o'clock murders.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: This is where we return to that opening scenario. Under
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: the direct orders of Aaron LeBaron, the cult executes a
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: perfectly synchronized multi-state assassination protocol. At exactly 4 p.m. Central Time,
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: gunmen strike in Houston, Texas, targeting two former followers, brothers
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: Mark and Dwayne Chinoweth.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: And the collateral damage is just gut-wrenching. Dwayne Chinoweth had
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: his eight-year-old daughter Jennifer with him in the truck while
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: he was running errands. Oh, man. Jennifer was not on
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Ervil's manifesto, but the shooters were instructed to leave no witnesses.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: They murdered an eight-year-old girl simply because she was sitting
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: in the passenger seat.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: Horrific.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: And at that exact same moment, 250 miles away in Irving, Texas,
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: another team guns down Eddie Marston, one of Ervil's stepsons
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: who had left the group.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: Let's truly analyze the logistics required to pull this off
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: in 1988. Think about the communication barriers. You have a marginalized,
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: impoverished group. They do not have access to modern technology.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: To execute simultaneous hits in different cities requires an astonishing
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: level of discipline and tradecraft.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, how does a splintered cult coordinate simultaneous hits
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: without modern tracking? You need synchronized digital watches. You need
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: weeks of advanced scouting to learn the exact routines of
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: the targets. You need rented vehicles that can't be traced
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: back to the compound. You need to pre-position weapons. The
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: accounts mentioned they had Erin's sister, Cynthia, acting as a
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: forward observer. She was sitting in a parked car down
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: the street from Mark's appliance shop, watching through binoculars, waiting
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: for the precise minute to signal the shooters to move in.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: It proves that this was not a disorganized group of
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: religious zealots acting on a sudden emotional impulse. This was
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: a highly structured, deeply indoctrinated militant cell carrying out a
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: tactical operation. Yeah. They were operating with the cold precision
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: of soldiers executing a legal order because, in their warped reality,
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: the order was the highest law of the universe.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: The justice system did eventually catch up to the perpetrators
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: of the four o'clock murders. Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron got three
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: years in federal prison for essentially funding her siblings and
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: helping them hide while they were on the run. Cynthia,
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: the spotter with the binoculars, managed to secure immunity in
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: exchange for testifying against her own family. Aaron, the son
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: who actually orchestrated the synchronized hits, was sentenced to 45 years.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: The gunman who pulled the triggers received life sentences.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: But the sentences handed down by the courts barely scratched
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: the surface of the total destruction caused by Ervil's teachings.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: Forensic experts and historians estimate that Ervil LeBaron and his
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: immediate cult are directly linked to anywhere between 25 to
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: 50 murders. spread across Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Texas.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: And California. And what haunts me is that so many
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: of those victims have simply vanished. We know they are dead,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: but their bodies have never been recovered.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: The accounts mention Ervil's own daughter, Rebecca. Her siblings described
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: her as struggling with severe mental illness. She became an
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: inconvenience to the cult, so several of Ervil's followers reportedly
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: took her out into the remote Mexican desert, strangled her,
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: and buried her in a shallow grave that remains entirely undiscovered.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: That is just awful.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: His wife Lorna went missing under highly suspicious circumstances, along
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: with several other defectors. The earth just literally swallowed them up.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: It is a dark, sprawling legacy of uncounted dead. But
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: what is perhaps the most tragic element of this entire
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: saga is that Ervil's legacy of bloodshed did not remain
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: neatly contained to the 1970s and 80s.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: No, it didn't.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: The violent, isolated culture he embedded into the DNA of
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: that community in northern Mexico eventually collided with a modern,
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: entirely different breed of ruthlessness.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we have to look at the modern fallout of
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: this isolation. The broader LeBaron community, including many who completely
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: rejected Ervil's violent splinter group, remained in those remote colonies
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: in northern Mexico. But the geopolitical landscape of that desert
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: had radically changed over the decades.
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: It was no longer just an empty expanse where polygamists
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: could hide from the U.S. government. It had become prime,
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: heavily contested territory for the Mexican drug cartels.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: And when you have a prosperous, isolated community living outside
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: the standard protections of the state, they become a target.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: In 2009, this tension boiled over. A local cartel kidnapped
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Eric LeBaron, a 16-year-old descendant, and demanded a massive ransom. Right.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: The community, showing incredible solidarity, rallied together, publicly protested, pressured
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: the local government, and successfully managed to get Eric released
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: without paying a dime to the cartel.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: Which was incredibly brave. But in the world of the cartels,
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: defiance demands brutal retaliation. Two months after Eric was released,
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: cartel hitmen, operating under the orders of a leader named
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Jose El Rincon Escajeda, broke into the home of Eric's
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: older brother, Benjamin LeBaron.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: Oh, man.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: They dragged Benjamin and his brother-in-law, Luis Carlos Woodmar, out
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: into the street and executed them as a warning to
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: the rest of the community.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: The community suddenly realized the absolute precarity of their existence.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: They were entirely unprotected by local law enforcement, which was
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: often outgunned or corrupted by the cartels. So in a
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: desperate bid for survival, members of the LeBaron colonies began
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: smuggling high-powered firearms from the United States down into Mexico
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: to form their own self-defense militias.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Devastating generational irony of that for a second. Think about
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: Alma Dayer LeBaron in the 1920s. He moves his family
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: to the Mexican desert to escape the laws of the U.S. government. Right.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: Ervil then uses that geographical isolation and access to firearms
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: to build a tyrannical, violent kingdom where he is the
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: only law. And decades later, that exact same isolation leaves
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: his descendants completely vulnerable to a heavily armed, organized crime syndicate,
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: forcing them to illegally import U.S. weapons just to keep
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: themselves from being slaughtered.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: It's tragic.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: Is it possible that the severe isolation Ervil forced upon
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: his family in Mexico to hide from U.S. authorities ultimately
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: turned them into sitting ducks for the cartels decades later?
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: The geographical moat that was built to keep the followers
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: trapped inside ultimately became the trap that kept any structural
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: help out.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: It is the inherent paradox of extreme isolation. It protects
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: the leader from outside scrutiny and legal consequences in the
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: short term and But it systematically strips the community of
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: the infrastructural protections of a functioning society. When a more powerful,
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: violent entity like a cartel moves into that power vacuum,
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: the isolated community has absolutely no recourse.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: And this vulnerability culminated in an event of just unspeakable
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: horror in November 2019. A convoy of LeBaron family descendants,
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: mothers and their children, were driving in SUVs along a
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: remote dirt road, simply traveling to a wedding in a
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: neighboring state. They were ambushed by heavily armed members of
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: the Juarez cartel.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: The cartel opened fire on the vehicles. They murdered nine
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: innocent people, three women and six children.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: It's just sickening.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: Among the dead were eight-month-old twins, Titus and Tiana. The
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: attackers shot them at close range and then ignited one
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: of the vehicles, burning a mother and her four children inside.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: In 2022, a U.S. federal judge ordered the cartel to
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: pay the surviving family's $ 4. 6 billion in damages. But you
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: and I both know that no amount of money, no
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: court ruling can ever rectify a massacre of that magnitude.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate tragic endpoint of generational isolation.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: But amidst all this darkness, the systemic violence, the multi-generational trauma,
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: there are stories of incredible resilience that we must acknowledge.
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: There are individuals who were born into the very center
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: of this echo chamber who somehow found the strength to
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: break the lock.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Anna LeBaron's story is the perfect example of this. Anna
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: is Ervil's daughter. And against all conceivable odds, she managed
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: to escape the cult when she was just 13 years old.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: Put yourself in the mind of a 13-year-old child in
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: that environment. Your entire universe has been constructed by a
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: man who claims to speak for God. Everyone around you
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: reinforces this reality. You have no money, no education in
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: the traditional sense, And you know that defectors are routinely murdered.
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: The psychological strength required to recognize that the only world
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: you have ever known is fundamentally wrong and to choose
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: to step into the absolute unknown is staggering.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: What does it take for a 13-year-old to realize that
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: the only world she's ever known is wrong and to
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: step into the complete unknown? She described her escape later
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: in life saying she walked out of the house with
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: literally just the clothes on her back.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: She was secretly aided by Lillian and Mark Chenoweth. And
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: this was years before Mark was tragically murdered in the
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: four o'clock hits in Houston. Anna stepped out of the
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: darkness and completely rebuilt her reality from scratch.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: She eventually documented her journey in a powerful memoir titled
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: The Polygamist's Daughter. And through her reflections as an adult,
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: she offers perhaps the most piercing, accurate autopsy of her
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: father's authoritarianism.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: What did she write?
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: She noted that even decades after Ervil died, her own mother,
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: Anna May, remained a completely devout, unwavering follower of his teachings.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Which just shows the sheer density of Ervil's psychological gravity.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: It is like a black hole in space.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: The star collapses, the physical body's gone, but the gravitational
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: pull left behind is so dense, so inescapable, that the
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: wives and followers are still trapped in orbit around a dark,
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: empty space.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: But it was a conclusion Anna drew about her father's
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: mental state that truly cuts to the core of this
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: entire phenomenon. Looking back at the paranoia, the grandiosity, the
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: endless violence, she stated her belief that her father was
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: suffering from profound mental illness. Right. But then she followed
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: it up with a rhetorical question that explains everything. She asked,
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: when you are the prophet, how much help do you
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: actually think you'll need? Wow.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: We have to unpack that. Because she just diagnosed the
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: fatal flaw of absolute power.
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: In any normal societal structure, if a person begins exhibiting
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: severe paranoia, violent ideation, or psychopathy, there are mechanisms for intervention.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Family members stage an intervention. Employers step in. Law enforcement
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: gets involved. Their doctors provide treatment. There is friction.
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: But when you elevate a human being to the status
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: of an infallible deity, you completely insulate them from reality.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: you remove all friction. Right. If Ervil was suffering from
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: a spiraling mental illness, there was absolutely no mechanism to
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: check it because every symptom of his sickness was immediately
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: interpreted by his followers as divine revelation.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: The delusion becomes the doctrine. And when the delusion becomes
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: the doctrine, you doom everyone in that leader's orbit to
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: suffer the consequences of an unmanaged, violent mind.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: So we have cracked an incredibly complex... dark trajectory today.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: We started with the origins of religious exile in the 1890s,
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: watching a family deliberately sever their ties to mainstream society.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: We examined the mechanical construction of a splintered echo chamber.
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: We looked at the calculated use of extreme poverty, physical exhaustion,
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: and child labor to strip away cognitive bandwidth.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: We saw how theology was twisted, how a forgotten pioneer
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: concept of blood atonement was weaponized to turn victims into assassins.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: We watched a leader psychologically lock a teenage girl into
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: a prison of complicity by forcing her to commit murder.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: We saw how a 400-page manifesto transformed into a dead
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: man's switch, orchestrating a terrifyingly precise multi-state assassination plot years
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: after the leader's death. And finally... we saw the devastating,
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: modern-day consequences of that generational isolation colliding with cartel brutality.
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: It is a comprehensive study in how absolute power is consolidated,
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: how reality is systematically rewritten for a group of people,
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: and how the trauma inflicted by those systems echoes down
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: through generations.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: And this brings it all directly back to you, listening
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: right now. You might be thinking, well, this is a
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: Wild true crime story, but I'm never going to join
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: a polygamist doomsday cult in the desert.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: And statistically, you are absolutely right. But the fundamental dynamics
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: we dissected today, they are everywhere.
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: The tools of manipulation are infinitely scalable. The exact same
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: psychological tactics used to orchestrate a murderous compound, isolating individuals
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: from outside perspectives, exhausting them, demanding absolute loyalty, punishing questions
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: as betrayal— and creating an intense us-versus-them narrative. Those are
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: used in lesser degrees to maintain control in everyday toxic environments.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: That is why this matters. Understanding the architecture of Ervil
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: LeBaron's control empowers you to spot those same red flags
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: in your own life. It teaches you to be inherently
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: suspicious of any system, any leader, or any relationship that
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: demands extreme isolation and unquestioned obedience.
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: It reminds you of the immense value of friction, of
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: diverse opinions. and of keeping your ties to the broader
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: reality intact.
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: Because once you surrender your critical thinking to a single,
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: unquestionable authority, the descent into their private reality is often
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: incredibly rapid and extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: I'm going to leave you with one final thought to
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: mull over as we wrap up this deep dive. Think
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: about the entire arc of Ervil LeBaron's empire. He started
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: by claiming divine revelation. He ended up ordering coordinated hits,
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: running money laundering fronts, and smuggling weapons.
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: When a community is built purely on the whims of
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: one man's manufactured revelations, at what exact point does the
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: boundary between a sacred, divine religious order and a ruthless
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: organized crime syndicate completely dissolve? And more importantly, can you
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: ever truly draw a line between the two once the
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: first drop of blood is shed? Thank you for taking
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: this deep dive with us.