June 15, 2022 • 51 mins
Ervil LeBaron spent two years in a Utah State Prison before his death in 1981. It left him with plenty of time to write a 500-page-long manifesto on his enemies. The Book of the New Covenant would go on to become a sacred text to Ervil’s many children, who had been raised in poverty, neglect and violence. Jesse Hyde sits down with one of Ervil’s daughters, Gabriela, to get an unprecedented look inside the lives of Ervil’s indoctrinated children who, after his death, would be led by Ervil’s eldest son Arthur. To them, the Book of the New Covenant was more than just scripture: it was a hit list.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel. A listener note this episode contains violence, including sexual violence,
and references to child abuse. Previously, on deliver Us from Herbal,
(00:26):
Hervil thought that if he got rid of Joel, that
he could just move in and take leadership with Joel's people. Well,
it didn't work. They were going to go out and
save the world. Herbal was their leader. And as they
went along, I started to thinking, started dragon and then
it caught on fire. She said, honey, here daddy's spent shot.
(00:52):
Then I said, is a dad and she said, yes,
he d Herville promised these people that if they took
these callings, they could never be convicted of a crime
because they hadn't really committed a crime in their hearts.
We all sat there and Judge raised the verdict of
(01:13):
not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. Vonda White
killed Dean vest because he was defecting to the FBI.
As he bent over the sink to wash up, she
sneaked up behind him and gave him one in the back,
which pierced his lungs. Okay, where were you at the time.
(01:34):
I was in the up stairs fantony. If not children,
and I've heard a succession in shots. Lloyd was my
principal witness. I recognize this as a lady who called
herself Vonda White, and she told me that she did
in the kill. The word came out to drive up
from Innsinaud in my house and kill me. They had
(01:55):
my address. Herbal was basically become her son and ungird
in Mexico. They just got fed up with him and
notified the US authorities that had been apprehended. We had
it figured out to take him right to the border, handcuffed,
and they did. Grandfatherly figure sitting in a jail jumpsuit,
(02:17):
and then the clerk creates the state of Utah ver
reserved labart in case number one too three as to
count one, we the jury Dooli and pandel An above
and title matter find the defendant, herb lebart And guilty
of conspiracy to commit murderer, first degree felony. With such
an unstable group founded on such erroneous principles, you never
really know what to expect. By the time hervill had died,
(02:40):
I knew it really wasn't over. Point of the Mountain
is what locals call the Utah State Prison. It's a
sprawling complex of drab, brown concrete buildings rounded by high
fences and razor wire, about twenty miles south of Salt
(03:04):
Lake City on the Interstate Hervilla. Barons spent two years
here before his death. In In that time, he alternated
between two distinct states, a bone deep depression that seemed
to send him spiraling into a trance. He tried to
end his life, shoving his own head down the toilet,
(03:26):
hoping to drown. When that didn't work, he asked the
warden to execute him, and then a delusional mania that
one day the walls would simply tumble down, the way
they had in the Bible at Jericho and he'd be free.
When these delusions set in, he wrote and wrote for
(03:50):
days at a time. So I guess start with talking
about or looking at here and how you got it.
I'm in a kitchen in San Diego. In front of
me is a large three ring binder divided by yellow stickers. Okay, well,
this is the Book of the New Covenant. It's a
manifesto of irvill Le Baron, who is the third member
(04:15):
of the Holy Trinity according to him, and also he's
incidentally the great grand Patriarch of Israel and the mouthpiece
of God. And this is Gary Remple, the scrapper from Stockton,
prosecutor for the District Attorney's Office you heard in the
previous episode, the one who liked to mad dog, the
gang bangers and killers he faced in court. He was
(04:38):
the first to secure a conviction against a member of
the LeBaron Coult the American Eagle, the Ceiling of the
hundred and forty thousand. Gary is describing the cover of
this book, hervill LeBaron's final Opus, written at Point of
the Mountain. It spans around five hundred pages. It's called
(04:59):
the Book of the New Covenant, or the b n
C as it would become known among his followers. It's
like hundreds of pages of self congratulating rhetoric that you
can hardly bear to look through. The book to the
uninitiated is kind of hard to follow, rambling, disjointed, but
(05:20):
if you've heard the first seven episodes of this podcast,
you'll recognize a lot of the names. Some of it's
an airing of past grievances, complaints about the scoundrels like
myself and the other wicked people like Joela Baron, who
had been murdered on Hervil's orders in seventy two, the
killing that started this all okay, page seventy uh now
(05:46):
to falsely accuse this humble and unassuming man Hervil of
the murder of a black hearted skunk and demon, a
veritable devil in the flesh, a snake of the first magnitude,
a dark and holy benighted traitor to me, and an
apostate of renown, and a terrible liar and conspirator and
murder of renown, even one rotten drug peddler and sneak
(06:10):
and adulter and hypocrite and dogmatic and willful deceiver of men,
women and children. He's basically talking about his own brother.
There are love letters to wives like Vonda White, who
Gary Remple put in prison for the murder of Dean Vests,
and Rina Channath, who evil sent to kill Dr Rulin Alread.
I myself killed that old rattlesnake and monster, doctor ruland
(06:35):
c Alread of royal polygamaust fame. That's Eervil's confession right
in the middle of this book. And I, therefore, your
Lord and your God will take all the blame and
responsibility for the untimely demise At one point the book
lurches from the personal to the political. Rville, it turns out,
is a Republican, and he offers advice to Ronald Reagan
(06:56):
and sympathy to his favorite politician. It talks to Richard Nixon,
dearly beloved Mr Nixon, since your retirement from the presidency
of the United States, I have been a deep mourning
because of the cynical way that you've been treated. I
love you greatly because of the great marvelous things that
you have done on behalf of America and of the
free world. And referring to himself as the Commander in
(07:18):
chief of the armed forces of all mankind, Herville sets
out his own Cold War era foreign policy. As soon
as Russia makes the slightest move to take any more power,
put a stop to the communist power on all North
and South America, according to the laws of my kingdom.
And if you need my help, I will give it
to you without any restraint, Saith the Lord God of
(07:39):
America and of Israel, and of Australia, and of Canada
and of all the English. As Gary and I leaf
through the pages of the Book of the New Covenant,
you can hear it in our voices. It's hard not
to laugh. The language, the range, it's well, I don't know,
the musing. I mean, it's just wonderful writing, consistently crazy
(08:03):
all the way through. But honestly, listening back to this
tape today, I kind of feel embarrassed hearing us laugh,
because I've since learned what this book means. It's legacy.
The book itself should never have seen the light of day,
But in early as Herville sat confined in his cell,
(08:26):
a copy was taken out of the prison, ironically by
a follower, Mark Schinath, who was actually about to leave
Herville's cult. Mark wasn't taken in by the book, but
for some reason he decided to show it to other
cult members. And those cult members they took the book
and made copies. They did not see self congratulating rhetoric.
(08:51):
They saw scripture, prophecy, a kind of manifesto. And they
did not see complaints and rants. They saw a hit list.
Gary Remple was named in that list, so were others
from law enforcement, like Dick Forbes, the man most responsible
for Herbal's imprisonment, and many others fifty people in all,
(09:16):
and not just law enforcement. Many of the names were
Herbal's former followers, people who, while Irvill was in prison,
had decided to walk away from the colt, and when
the book fell in the hands of those still loyal
to Irvill, those followers decided they needed to act. The Opus,
(09:39):
in their eyes, was a binding covenant with God, and
the fifty or so named in it had to be
atoned to be saved from hell, and the only way
to do that was to kill them through blood atonement,
that act of spilling blood and taking lives to save
sinners from any ernity in Mormon hell outer darkness. Before
(10:06):
he died, Herbal summoned his most loyal sons to point
at the mountain. In a ritual common and Mormonism, he
laid his hands on their heads. He ordained his oldest son, Arthur,
as the new patriarch of the cult. Six other sons
from four different mothers were ordained as high priests, and
(10:27):
each made a solemn vow to their father. If he
were to fall, they would carry on the work he
had started. They would cleanse the world of God's enemies.
These sons would fulfill the Book of the New Covenant
(10:49):
from the team's at novel and I Heart Radio. This
is deliver Us from Herbal. I'm Jesse Hyde. Episode eight,
The Reign of Arthur. I was wondering if you drink
(11:11):
coffee or if you didn't drink coffee, since you're a
since you're what do you call yourself? I'm in the
home of Gabriella a Baron. You heard her voice in
episode six, I described her as a former fundamentalist. If
you're not harm anymore, do you start drinking coffee? Or yeah,
I drink coffee. We're in her apartment in Austin, Texas,
(11:34):
surrounded by her paintings, abstract art she constructs by patiently
adding and removing layers of paint. Each takes months to complete.
It's a therapeutic process. Gabriella isn't just any former fundamentalist.
All right, Oh we're on now, okay, um, So I'm
(11:54):
Gabriella le Baron and my father is Irvilla a Baron.
This will be the first time she has ever shared
her story of her life in the LeBaron cult publicly.
I'm not here with Gabriella because I want to understand
her father, Irville. I'm here because I want to understand
what happened after he died. Why the story doesn't end
(12:16):
with his death, How the reign of terror his cult
unleashed continued for decades, How it somehow got even worse,
and what has become of that cycle of violence today.
Gabriella was born in nineteen seventy six, the same year
as me. Her mother, Teresa, was the child of indigenous
(12:39):
Mexicans who had moved to colonial LeBaron when Teresa was
just a child. Herville had thirteen wives, and one of
those wives is tere Srius and that's my mom. She
had four daughters, and I am the youngest of those four.
I was told that my mother loved my father, and
(13:03):
I believe he loved her too, and that's what was
told to us. It may sound obvious that a husband
and wife would love each other, but in my reporting experience,
it's often not the case in polygamous relationships. She was
on his side no matter what, and it caused me
to also worship my dad as soon as I was.
For Gabriella, her father was an almost mythical figure, like
(13:26):
children naturally worship their parents, but my experience with my
dad was taken to a holy level because he actually
was the representation of God on earth. As soon as
I was four years old, they were telling us these
stories that he was a great prophet and that he
was sent on earth to do some big, powerful, important
(13:48):
work that was gonna basically save humanity in the last days.
The world is coming to an end. Armageddon is honest
way you're going to see it in your lifetime. Your
father was sent to earth and he is he is
like the reincarnation of Jesus basically. Okay, so he represents
God on earth and you are so lucky to be
(14:12):
this great person's daughter. Right from the beginning, Gabriella had
to live with paradox cognitive dissonance because that great person
who everyone around her revered was completely absent from her life.
When did you first start to realize that that you
didn't matter to him? I always felt sad because we
(14:35):
would read all the letters that he wrote about all
his kids, and he never mentioned me in any one
of them, and I always waited for my name to
come up, and it never never did. For him, I
basically didn't exist. I didn't matter. Gabriella has jet black hair,
just like her mother. She always had her hair short
and she's dark skinned. Her parents are Indigenous, her father
(14:59):
is mixed race. She was very quiet, one of those
long suffering types. For a time in the late seventies,
Gabriella lived with her mom in Denver, Colorado, but not
with her father, who at this point was a fugitive
from the law. Gabriella lived under the supervision of a
different patriarch, Evil's right hand man, Dan Jordan's. Her mom
(15:24):
worked at Dan's appliance business. She was kind of the
little slave of the family, and she had no concept
of any kind of personal rights or space or ownership
of anything. In episode one, when I visited Colonial LeBaron,
I talked about the feeling of safety, of belonging, how
(15:46):
that was the entire point of the town. Building a utopia,
a zion. That's what Irvill and Joel had started out
trying to build. But by the time Gabriella came along
in seventy six, the ripples emanating outwards from Joel's murder
and the massacre at Los Melinos meant the children and
(16:07):
Hervil's cult had none of those feelings of hope or security.
Gabriela's existence was shadowed by a terrible, unrelenting dread so
talk about, um, you know, your early childhood, your your
earliest memories. If there's kind of like an image that
pops into your mind when you think back to your
(16:29):
early years. Oh god, it's terrible. Um hiding in the
closet because we're getting rated, and I think we were
in Denver. I vaguely remember that in the years before
her dad's arrest in seventy nine, cops would regularly arrive
unannounced at cold houses in raids to search the property
for any signs of him or other cult members. They
(16:51):
were hunting down And I was hugging my niece in
a really old style, small closet and on a pile
of blankets, must have been like four or five blankets,
and I was hiding behind the clothes, and I was
freaking terrified because we were being raided. All of Herbal's
followers scattered all over the United States experienced this feeling
(17:14):
of being constantly hunted by the law, and they knew
what to do when they got that knock on the door.
Never never, never speak to the police, no matter what
you die, first before you speak to the police. The
police were like the Boogeyman. It was just like you
know there's a robber outside. You know somebody's gonna break
into your house and hurt you, steal your stuff. That's
(17:36):
what normal people are afraid of. I was afraid of
a policeman being outside and looking inside in order to
try and avoid the eyes of the law. Each time
cult members settled somewhere new, they transformed themselves. And all
those times that we moved around in the States, we
changed our names every single time, so I got really
(17:57):
good at adopting a new personality. It was five years
old or four years old, and I had a new name,
and they told me what my new name was, and
that's who I was, and I just melted into it.
Like other cult members, Gabrielle's childhood was spent moving from
city to city. The children were instructed to never speak
to strangers, to never leave the house, to never raise
(18:18):
the blinds. The adults went out and worked to earn
money for the colt, usually by repairing appliances. We were
left at home alone, and I think the oldest child
was about eight years old, and there must have been
about ten of us. The kids tried their best to
entertain themselves, but with no TV or radio, they had
(18:42):
to get creative. They would often break the rules and
venture into the backyard. I used to play in the
grass a lot. I used to love to try to
catch grasshoppers. It was one of my favorite things to do.
And they had a sprinkler on and then we were
out in the running in the sprinkler and jumping over
it and trying to catch grasshoppers. That was so much fun.
(19:04):
And I caught a little one, a tiny, little black grasshopper.
I put it in a jar with a bunch of grass.
I called it Blackie. And air Supply was playing a lot.
And then there was this one song that goes here,
I'm the one that you la la la la and forever.
I called that one the grasshopper song. And years later
(19:25):
I'd be like, oh, the grasshopper song and stolen moments
of childhood innocence. Across long board summers, the children of
herbal LeBaron would play together, and sometimes rays of light
broke through the darkness of cold life. We were all
in this house across the street, an empty house, a
(19:47):
vacant house, but they had a full swimming pool, so
we would run across the street. The pavement was so
hot our feet were always burning. So we'd run across
the street and go through the side gate to their backyard,
to nobody's backyard, and go and swim in their pool.
And we'd swim for hours and then come back up.
And then we do that every single day, and these
(20:08):
like whole little herd of kids running across the street
to swim in these people's empty house backyard swimming pool.
And then one day somebody moved in. It was terrible.
So two of the oldest kids decided to go and
ask for mission if we could swim. So one was
a boy when I was a girl. And they go
(20:29):
and they knock on the door and they're like, can
we swim in your pool? And it was a nice
looking young couple, and they said yes, of course, And
then they turned around. My siblings turned around to us
and said they said yes. And so all they heard
of kids come running across the street and swim for
hours and these people So that was the last time
(20:52):
we ever swim there. Oh god, mh. I mentioned earlier
that Gabrielle and I are the same age. Maybe that's
why when she tells these stories catching grasshoppers, listening to
air supply, it takes me right back to my childhood.
(21:14):
I feel that ache of nostalgia for the innocence of
encountering the world for the first time before it lets
us down, betrays us. And then I think about Gabriella
when the fear subsided for just a moment. How rare
and precious that time must have been. Moments of feeling safe.
(21:37):
For polygamus children sired by a man with countless other kids,
often the only place that really feels like home is mom.
Yet even in childhood, Gabriella could sense her mother was unraveling.
I was very conscious of how much my mother was suffering.
I was very careful to not ask anything of her. Basically,
(22:00):
you want to hold your breath all the time, because
even breathing might be too much. Her mother's descent left
Gabriella bereft, and I remember she was in her bedroom
on bed with the fever, and she was saying all
kinds of random nonsense, like schizophonic things, and we were
(22:21):
just I was just sitting at the end of Bitch
watching her and worrying about her and knowing that she
was out of it. She lost it completely. My mom
wasn't aware enough to be able to defend me. And
she had no rights even over her own children. Gabriella
had no rights either. She belonged to the cult. Would
you guys call yourselves the family? What did you guy?
(22:44):
Because there's no way you called thisselves the cold? Oh? No,
Coult wasn't even a word reknew of. There was no cult.
We were the Koug if anything. Yeah, we called ourselves.
Kg is the nickname for our cult, the Kingdom of God.
We were God's Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, or the Kog,
(23:16):
as it was known to its members. This is what
the cult started by Herville was now named. In just
a few years, some of the younger members wouldn't even
remember what the name Church of the Lamb of God
referred to. Long live the Kog. It was them versus
the outside world, who they called the gentiles, the infidels,
(23:40):
the enemy. That meant no friends outside the colt. Talking
to someone who didn't belong to the Kog was strictly forbidden.
When I was nine years old, I had made a
vow that I would give my life so nobody there
had a life to hold onto. Our lives, all of
our lives before fit already just by being in the
(24:01):
cult just by being born into it. You know, our family,
our well being, our money, where we're going to live,
how are we going to live ultimately? Our lives. And
when a person had to die, it was so that
person could be saved ultimately, so we didn't see it
is an evil, I think it wasn't death, wasn't terror.
(24:25):
You're going to be somewhere so much better, you know,
And if you don't do this, you probably could go
to hell forever in all eternity, which is the worst
possible thing that could happen to anybody. And when we
really really believe that so much so that we were
ready to give our lives for it, and we couldn't
have emotional attachment to each other because we would have
to let go of one another. We wouldn't know when
(24:47):
we would have to let go of our sister brother.
This was the law as laid out in the bulk
of the New Covenant, the law that would survive Evil's death,
in a law now in the hands of his eldest son, Arthur.
He was the son charged with leading the next generation.
(25:08):
That's after the break in the days after herbl LeBaron's
death late August, most of his wives and children living
(25:30):
in the US suddenly headed south. Hours later, a group
of the cult kids, teens, and a few adults across
the border into Mexico. Gabriella was five years old in
August one as she arrived in a remote corner of Sonora,
a vast and wild Mexican state which sits in the
(25:53):
upper northwest corner of the country. Her destination was about
eighty miles from the US border with r Zona. I
remember the night we showed up. It was like one
o'clock in the morning. It was a pitch dark, like
I can't even see my hand. There was no town.
In fact, there were no lights at all. Darkness was
(26:17):
so thick. I had never experienced that kind of darkness
ever in my life. He was so quiet and so
spooky and so scary and if people like be careful
because our sakes, and spiders and scorpions and all these
dangerous things. By the first light of day in Sonora,
Gabriella began to make out adobe ruins and an endless
(26:38):
expanse of mesquite brush and cactus, not all that different
from colonial LeBaron at its inception. This was to be
their new home. The ranch called Lahoya, or camp as
they called it. Gabriella had been told her mother would
be there in Mexico waiting. They believed it was okay
to tell children lies in order to get them stopped crying.
(27:00):
So I got there and she wasn't there, and that
was like a huge caving disappointment. Before his death, Merville
had passed his favorite son, Arthur, the mantle of the
one mighty and Strong. So when Hervill died, Arthur immediately
had leadership of the colt. For Arthur, this was a
(27:24):
heavy responsibility, but he shielded the kids from the weight
of the crown he now carried. He ran around, played
games with us. He promised us all kinds of cool playgrounds.
He promised us the world. Gabriella remembers Arthur as tall
and handsome, with wavy hair, and he's always wearing some
button down plaid shirt full of bright energy. He had
(27:47):
a lot of energy for me, so when he looked
at me, I could see the light in his eyes
in this smile and the love that he had for me.
He would pick me up in his arms and be
like Mike going to hit the un He would me
this big hug every time he came home from work,
and it was just as a child, I didn't get
that attention from anybody, not my father, not my uncle's
(28:09):
not There was no male figure that gave me that
kind of love or attention. Arthur was the only one.
So for him, I existed and I mattered, and of
course I ate that up. That was actually the only
really pure adult male relationship I had. He was loved.
We loved him to death, and we would definitely go
(28:31):
to the ends of the world for him and with him.
Irville had tried to build utopia in colonial A Baron
and then Los Molinos. He had failed spectacularly, but now
his son Arthur would try again. Here in Sonora. We
were inspired to do great things. He wanted to build
(28:52):
the ranch into some fabulous you know, treat these great
playgrounds and make sure the kids had a lot of fun.
He wanted to His idea of the Kingdom of God
was making a really fabulous place for us, and um
there was there was so exhilarating to think about and
to see the Kingdom of God as a giant playground.
(29:12):
If that didn't seem like the promise of Heaven to
a five year old, what would without many adults around,
the kids ran wild. They swam in the rough hewn
concrete pool that collected water for irrigation, and ran down
to the ocean, which was just a few miles away.
We were way off the grid, but we had music
on cassette tapes Sweet Caroline, no Diamond, Yeah, so we
(29:38):
had no Diamond, barber Strass and air supply Survivor Europe.
So then we started listening to Antonio, which I loved
because it was all about horses. And when I was
five years old, I loved horses and I wanted to
be a horse. I wanted to run like horse like
so bad. Yet, just like in colonial abeyance or early
(30:00):
days in Lahoya, the undercurrents of darkness and danger were
never far away. Caborca, the nearest town to the ranch,
belonged to the Mexican mafia. It had been a hideout
for drug and gun smugglers for a long time, and
they gave the colt safe haven to live there. Why
would the Mexican mafia give safe haven to a bunch
(30:22):
of Mormon fundamentalists, Well because by this point in Arthur
worked for them. In fact, pretty much the entire cult did.
While Irville and Dan Jordans had mostly funded their version
of the cult by entirely unexciting and unglamorous trades like
(30:42):
fixing up busted washing machines. The second generation of the COLT,
the Kog, they were more inventive. We have contacts at
the border, at the customers the other Onuana, and so
we funneled cars to the mafia and sold them. The
COLT would steal them to order for the drug cartels.
(31:03):
They paid are just prices for them. They're really paid
in cash too. Aside from these new contacts, the ranch
had some other regular visitors, a group of men who
were supposed to bring money down from the US to
support the Colt there. These visitors included two brothers, Raoul
(31:23):
and Gama Leo, known as the Rio's brothers, Gabriella's uncles
on her mother's side, and also a man named Leo Evaneck.
Leo Evanick was short and chubby, with a thin mustache
and graying hair. He sometimes wore horn rimmed glasses and
tried to look like an upstanding businessman, but he had
(31:46):
once been a drug smuggler. He'd been arrested off the
coast of San Diego with half a ton of marijuana
hidden in a boat. He was thrown in jail and
insnota Mexico, which is where he met irvill Le Baron,
and by the time he was released in n he
(32:06):
had converted to Evil's colt. Whenever Leo and this group
of men arrived at Lahoya, Gabriella and the other children
knew what to do hide. It was just a given
that the men would take advantage of the girls. The
(32:26):
men could do whatever they wanted. So we were in
a situation where there were a lot of predators and
there were no adults to protect the kids. The only
adults were the predators, and some of the kids were
like abused more than others, but everybody basically was affused.
There were mothers in the camp, and you'd think they'd
(32:47):
protect their children, but as Gabriella describes it, they were
mostly out of it, or like Gabriella's own mother, trying
to hold on to their last shreds of sanity, in
no position to help, and as far as Leo and
the Rio's brothers saw it, Hervil had already given them away.
(33:09):
They were promised this girl and that girl and all
that stuff. So they were like, Okay, she's mine, so
I have rights, you know, starting now. But Gabriella learned
something previous victims of the cold had realized. There was
no escape. We knew, like we'd sense the injustice, but
we couldn't do anything about it. So you go back
(33:31):
and remember that dislike God, It's terrific. And then mothers
getting killed. One of the mothers who was down. If
they tried to run away, they never they had a
plan to run away and to sneak off, and one
of the little kids would snitch the mother Gabriella is
talking about. Here is Laurena Shannath, sister to Rena, Mark, Joyne, Victor,
(33:55):
and Glenn, the first in that whole family to leave
the US for Mexico to marry hervill Le Baron by two.
The year following Hervil's death, Lorna had decided she wanted
out from Lahoya, out from the colt. One of the
(34:18):
kids in the colt had found out about her plans
for escaping their group, and that child had snitched on
her to one of the older teens. So on her
way out she was ambushed and killed. It's like nobody
could run away like anybody that tried to escape couldn't escape.
And um, we were indoctrinated that this was good, and we,
(34:41):
in our prayers prayed for the killing of the bad
people of the SPC. We were trained, heavily trained, kind
of like in a Spartanesque style s o p Son
of Perdition Kog the Kingdom of God, little kids born
(35:03):
into terror and abuse, raised up to fulfill the prophecies
contained in the Book of the New Covenant. And what
Gabriella would soon realize is that no one, not even Arthur,
her dearest protector, was safe. That's coming up after the break.
(35:38):
When Herville summoned his most loyal sons to point of
the Mountain prison in he wanted to clear up any
confusion about the future of his dynasty. He wanted to
establish a clear line of succession to Arthur. As an
(35:59):
attentive student of organized crime, he'd foreseen an oncoming power
vacuum while he was behind bars, and he knew some
cult members and wives were trying to quietly slip away.
Maybe naming a successor would stop at all breaking apart.
But he was too late. The cracks were already there,
(36:23):
and after his death in eighty one, they continued to widen.
What was once called the Church of the Lamb of
God disintegrated by three there were four distinct pieces factions.
It's like a mafia, right, so if you the mafia
breaks apart, one team goes against the other team, and
(36:46):
so that's what happened. So the danger was really high
now everybody was going to try to kill each other.
The first faction were mostly Chinats, that original family Hervil
had built his empire are upon Mark and Dwayne and
Vic and Rena Vic the money man, Mark and Dwayne
Colt assassin's and Rena, a once favored wife an assassin
(37:12):
who had ignored Herville's letters from prison. They'd all left
for Texas, along with another seasoned Hervil killer, Eddie Marston.
The second faction of this mafia split was led by
Dan Jordan's He had turned on Hervil and was starting
his own operation in Denver. What's more, Dan had given
(37:32):
refuge to one of Herville's wives, Anime Marston, after his death,
and so he had a bunch of the Labaran kids
living with him. So in the eyes of the ko G,
he was a threat to both those kids, their siblings
and their operation at Lahoya, and by eighty three there
was a third and final mafia faction that rivaled Arthur's Kog,
(37:54):
and this group was the most immediate threat to the Coult.
They were led by Leo Evanick. Unlike the other factions,
Leo had stayed loyal to Hervil, visiting him at Point
of the Mountain at least a dozen times, and like
Rvill's sons, he seemed to believe in the Book of
the New Covenant. Leo also accepted that Arthur now carried
(38:18):
the mantle of the One Mighty and Strong, as with
Joel and Hervill. At the beginning of this podcast, Leo
and Arthur initially made a good team. Arthur didn't say much,
but he had the followers, an army of half brothers
and sisters and little kids who would give their lives
for him. Leo, unlike Arthur, understood Rvill's intricate theology and
(38:41):
shared Hervill's ability to hold forth on doctrine for hours.
From their base in Mexico, Arthur and Leo started drafting letters,
just as Hervill would have done, threatening those other mafia
families who had broken from their late prophet. But over
time Arthur and Leo began to clash over money, wives,
(39:03):
matters of theology. It all seems so familiar. We started
to get the sense of being more afraid because now
this internal civil war was going on between our team,
Leo Evnick and my uncle's. They threatened to kill the
(39:23):
adults and to condapt the children. By the spring of
night three, the Kyog camp at Lahoya was split, those
who backed Leo and those who backed Arthur. And in
the middle were the children, the next generation of soldiers, devotees,
drug smugglers, car thieves, believers and assassins. The religious ideal
(39:47):
in our time and these in this cult, and this
is what all the adults believed in, even when they
were broke up. Art Kill the adults, get up the children,
because the children are the future. So the children were
the price gold. In the spring of eight three, a
group from the colt had set off from Lahoya to
make a trip to get groceries in Caborca, that nearby
(40:09):
mafia controlled town. While they were on the road, they
started getting shot. It so the guys came out and
they were like hiding and running and hiding, and one
of them got shot. Peers through the lake. They recognized
the shooters as Leo's men, the Rio's brothers, Gamaliel. I
don't know who else was there, but they're about five
(40:31):
other men. The Kog realized they were now at war
with Leo's faction, and it was extremely so scary. It's like,
oh my god, it's so scary. Not long after that ambush,
early one morning, before most of the children and mothers
of the camp had woken up, Leo, Raoul Rios and
(40:54):
other gunmen were spotted again. This time they were approaching
the Kog's camp camp. They were dressed in soldiers uniforms
and carried guns. We were just waking up, you know,
wiping her eyes still. One of the kids came running
fast as he could and suddenly like Leon, really fucking run.
(41:17):
I had one shoe on, one shoe off. I couldn't
untied the knot of my shoes. I can put it on.
I have to fix this knot so I can put
my shoe on, so I can go. And I was
trying to fix the knock oh, and everybody had gone
without me. And then one of them was like gabre
like comet of know. It's like, oh god, chimp out
the window just take your shoe with you. Oh God,
get me out of here fast. So we jumped through
the window and we ran to the cactus heell. The
(41:42):
cactus hill is where the children of the camp had
been trained to run for safety if they came under fire.
It was a sort of briar patch with a chola cactus.
Choya is the meanest cactus that you could ever imagine.
There's a little tiny needles. It's a ball with needles,
and they just they stick in you so hard you
have to have pliers to pull them out really hard.
(42:05):
And we ran into it, some people barefoot, some people
choose on and I ran with my shoot. And there
are tiny little empty spaces. The tiny little trails could
have been rabbit trails or something where you could put
your foot and try to avoid the cactus. And then
it would be like cactus arms everywhere, So you're gonna
(42:26):
have to like move around and then find one little
like three by three little space where you can just
stop and hide. The children and the rest of the
kog hid in the cactus fields, holding their breath as
the gunmen passed by, and then they heard them moving
(42:46):
away from where they hid. Eventually there was silence. The
attack was over. No casualties on that occasion, but after
that the redoubled their vigilance against attack. The kids of
the camp would stay up all night on watch duty.
We'd take turns guarding, keeping watch with binoculars, because you
(43:09):
could see when there's somebody coming. You could see so
far out and it's flat and everything is really flat,
so if there's a car coming, you could see the
headlights moving around right miles and miles and miles away,
so there would be somebody watching for headlights, if the
dogs bark, and these kinds of things would start to
happen before the attack happened. That summer, there were three
(43:34):
attacks on the camp by Leo's men. Eventually, Gabriella's mother
persuaded Arthur to send her to Dallas to live with her.
But even in Dallas, Gabriella didn't feel safe. If somebody
knocks on the door, it could be your uncle role
so do not answer. You need to go to the
back room and call the shop. Now. We will come
here as fast as we can. And so we lived
(43:58):
with this terror that we home alone and some evil
people might show up. And they were really evil and
they had chosen the devil's side, and they were dangerous now,
and they could kidnap you and take you away and
you'll never see us again. It was completely terrifying. Gabriella
was back to hiding in closets. Now it was her
(44:20):
own family members causing the panic and terror. She sat
with her sister Jenny, hiding, sitting as silently as she
could for hours, and then would hear sounds, footsteps, something rattling,
fucking scared. And then if we forgot to close occur
in during the daytime, when the night came, we're like,
somebody could be out the window looking inside. Oh God,
(44:41):
and we couldn't move because we couldn't be in the
sight of that window. So we would just stay in
that one little crack of the house until the adult
came home. At the end of the war between Arthur
and Leo came to a head. On the morning of
December nineteen, Arthur returned to Lahya mac Ago after a
trip to Dallas. Arthur actually had this premonition that it
(45:05):
was going to happen. He told his wife that he
knew he was gonna die in a few days, and
he went down to the ranch and remember the ranches
of really big clearing and there are these two big trees.
When Arthur arrived, Leo and the Rio's brothers were waiting
for him, and I think they assaulted him. Under those trees.
(45:28):
Near the trees was a new airstream trailer Arthur had
stolen and smuggled across the border. All the kids were
in there, so one of one of the moms or
one of the adults were there. They closed all the
curtains and didn't and locked the kids inside because they
knew what was going to happen. The kids would have
gone out to fight for Arthur, but they were allowed
(45:51):
to go out um and Arthur was They beat him
and he was yelling for help, and they shot him
and they loaded in the back of the pickup truck
and buried his body at the side of the road
under a few inches of sand. And Gabriella was in
Dallas during the killing. An older sister broke the news.
(46:12):
You were in the car, and she just said, I
have to tell you the Arthur's been killed. And I froze,
like my whole body went like cold, white, frozen. Don't
tell anybody that you know that was it. I had
to walk around pretending like I didn't know something that
just my favorite person in the world was just killed.
You can't feel emotions, You can't more than anybody that's gone.
(46:36):
And you have to be ready to do the killing
yourself if it's required you So like you wait five
six seven years old, you're already being taught this. Gabriella
was now seven seven years old. It's hard to comprehend
all she had seen and experienced in so few years,
(46:59):
and now her only protector in the world was gone.
And then shortly after that, my mother had a mental breakdown,
and so she left. Where did she go? She was
picked up by the police on the streets, and then
she was put in a mental hospital. That was it,
(47:21):
and I never saw her. In Gabriella's short life so far,
fear had never been far away. In brief moments, like
a montage in a movie, she had felt happiness, safety,
holding a grasshopper, being carried on Arthur's back, running across
(47:45):
the asphalt on a hot summer day to jump in
a neighbor swimming pool. But her constant companions were always
waiting for her terror and dread. Now they were almost
becoming a part of her, I stopped talking to people.
(48:05):
I mean I could talk, but if you asked me
a question, I wouldn't answer. I just like go stone cold.
I didn't have the ability to move my vescle listen answer.
And it frustrated all the adults because they were like,
we just it's okay, you're not in trouble. I couldn't
physically talk, but I don't remember anything else. I don't
remember feeling anything, and feel sadness, I'm feel anything, just
(48:31):
kind of freeze up. And he moved around like furniture
wherever you're supposed to go. With her mother gone, Gabriella
went back to LaToya. Arriving at that camp in Sonora,
she joined up with cult members who are now under
new leadership. Once Arthur had been killed, they'd immediately turned
(48:53):
the Book of the New Covenant for direction to them.
It's spelled out exactly what should happen. If Arthur was
cut down, the one mighty and Strong would pass on
to the next male heir. So Hebrew the mantle fell
on him, and he did not sign up for it.
(49:13):
Arthur's half brother, a teenager named William Hebrew LeBaron, he
had inherited Hervil's good looks in his height, but not
his interest in theology. See, Hebrew didn't study. He was
not one of those kind of guys. He was more
of a party like a rock star type of guy.
He was much more interested in helping the family develop
(49:33):
their ties with the Mexican mafioso's cars, drugs, whatever they
were into, he was into. Hebrew liked to party, he drank,
He did coke and marijuana. He seemed like he was
about to escalate the cults activities into uncharted new hedonistic territory.
But the thing is in the cult, is it? A
(49:55):
Christian can't do that? But how do you tell that
to the one mining and stronge That's coming up in
the next episode of deliver Us from Herville. Deliver Us
(50:23):
from Herville is hosted by me jesse Hyde and written
and reported by me Leona Hamid and David Waters. Production
from Leona Hamid and David Waters. Sean Glenn and Max
O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Oyinka are researchers.
Marianna Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking by Donya
(50:46):
Suleman and Sona Avakian production management from Sharie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolf Austin Mitchell is our creative director of Production.
Micha Lee Raw is our managing at a R. Gavin
Haynes is our Head of Development. Willard Foxton is our
creative director of Development. Mix scoring and sound design by
(51:10):
Eli Block Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters.
Our music is composed by Julian Lynch. Special thanks to
Scott Anderson, Scott Carrier, Del van Ada, Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards,
Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvelle and beth An Makaluso, or In Rosenbaum,
(51:31):
Shelby Shankman and all the team at U t A.
For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio
Novel. A listener note this episode contains violence, including sexual violence,
and references to child abuse. Previously, on deliver Us from Herbal,
(00:26):
Hervil thought that if he got rid of Joel, that
he could just move in and take leadership with Joel's people. Well,
it didn't work. They were going to go out and
save the world. Herbal was their leader. And as they
went along, I started to thinking, started dragon and then
it caught on fire. She said, honey, here daddy's spent shot.
(00:52):
Then I said, is a dad and she said, yes,
he d Herville promised these people that if they took
these callings, they could never be convicted of a crime
because they hadn't really committed a crime in their hearts.
We all sat there and Judge raised the verdict of
(01:13):
not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. Vonda White
killed Dean vest because he was defecting to the FBI.
As he bent over the sink to wash up, she
sneaked up behind him and gave him one in the back,
which pierced his lungs. Okay, where were you at the time.
(01:34):
I was in the up stairs fantony. If not children,
and I've heard a succession in shots. Lloyd was my
principal witness. I recognize this as a lady who called
herself Vonda White, and she told me that she did
in the kill. The word came out to drive up
from Innsinaud in my house and kill me. They had
(01:55):
my address. Herbal was basically become her son and ungird
in Mexico. They just got fed up with him and
notified the US authorities that had been apprehended. We had
it figured out to take him right to the border, handcuffed,
and they did. Grandfatherly figure sitting in a jail jumpsuit,
(02:17):
and then the clerk creates the state of Utah ver
reserved labart in case number one too three as to
count one, we the jury Dooli and pandel An above
and title matter find the defendant, herb lebart And guilty
of conspiracy to commit murderer, first degree felony. With such
an unstable group founded on such erroneous principles, you never
really know what to expect. By the time hervill had died,
(02:40):
I knew it really wasn't over. Point of the Mountain
is what locals call the Utah State Prison. It's a
sprawling complex of drab, brown concrete buildings rounded by high
fences and razor wire, about twenty miles south of Salt
(03:04):
Lake City on the Interstate Hervilla. Barons spent two years
here before his death. In In that time, he alternated
between two distinct states, a bone deep depression that seemed
to send him spiraling into a trance. He tried to
end his life, shoving his own head down the toilet,
(03:26):
hoping to drown. When that didn't work, he asked the
warden to execute him, and then a delusional mania that
one day the walls would simply tumble down, the way
they had in the Bible at Jericho and he'd be free.
When these delusions set in, he wrote and wrote for
(03:50):
days at a time. So I guess start with talking
about or looking at here and how you got it.
I'm in a kitchen in San Diego. In front of
me is a large three ring binder divided by yellow stickers. Okay, well,
this is the Book of the New Covenant. It's a
manifesto of irvill Le Baron, who is the third member
(04:15):
of the Holy Trinity according to him, and also he's
incidentally the great grand Patriarch of Israel and the mouthpiece
of God. And this is Gary Remple, the scrapper from Stockton,
prosecutor for the District Attorney's Office you heard in the
previous episode, the one who liked to mad dog, the
gang bangers and killers he faced in court. He was
(04:38):
the first to secure a conviction against a member of
the LeBaron Coult the American Eagle, the Ceiling of the
hundred and forty thousand. Gary is describing the cover of
this book, hervill LeBaron's final Opus, written at Point of
the Mountain. It spans around five hundred pages. It's called
(04:59):
the Book of the New Covenant, or the b n
C as it would become known among his followers. It's
like hundreds of pages of self congratulating rhetoric that you
can hardly bear to look through. The book to the
uninitiated is kind of hard to follow, rambling, disjointed, but
(05:20):
if you've heard the first seven episodes of this podcast,
you'll recognize a lot of the names. Some of it's
an airing of past grievances, complaints about the scoundrels like
myself and the other wicked people like Joela Baron, who
had been murdered on Hervil's orders in seventy two, the
killing that started this all okay, page seventy uh now
(05:46):
to falsely accuse this humble and unassuming man Hervil of
the murder of a black hearted skunk and demon, a
veritable devil in the flesh, a snake of the first magnitude,
a dark and holy benighted traitor to me, and an
apostate of renown, and a terrible liar and conspirator and
murder of renown, even one rotten drug peddler and sneak
(06:10):
and adulter and hypocrite and dogmatic and willful deceiver of men,
women and children. He's basically talking about his own brother.
There are love letters to wives like Vonda White, who
Gary Remple put in prison for the murder of Dean Vests,
and Rina Channath, who evil sent to kill Dr Rulin Alread.
I myself killed that old rattlesnake and monster, doctor ruland
(06:35):
c Alread of royal polygamaust fame. That's Eervil's confession right
in the middle of this book. And I, therefore, your
Lord and your God will take all the blame and
responsibility for the untimely demise At one point the book
lurches from the personal to the political. Rville, it turns out,
is a Republican, and he offers advice to Ronald Reagan
(06:56):
and sympathy to his favorite politician. It talks to Richard Nixon,
dearly beloved Mr Nixon, since your retirement from the presidency
of the United States, I have been a deep mourning
because of the cynical way that you've been treated. I
love you greatly because of the great marvelous things that
you have done on behalf of America and of the
free world. And referring to himself as the Commander in
(07:18):
chief of the armed forces of all mankind, Herville sets
out his own Cold War era foreign policy. As soon
as Russia makes the slightest move to take any more power,
put a stop to the communist power on all North
and South America, according to the laws of my kingdom.
And if you need my help, I will give it
to you without any restraint, Saith the Lord God of
(07:39):
America and of Israel, and of Australia, and of Canada
and of all the English. As Gary and I leaf
through the pages of the Book of the New Covenant,
you can hear it in our voices. It's hard not
to laugh. The language, the range, it's well, I don't know,
the musing. I mean, it's just wonderful writing, consistently crazy
(08:03):
all the way through. But honestly, listening back to this
tape today, I kind of feel embarrassed hearing us laugh,
because I've since learned what this book means. It's legacy.
The book itself should never have seen the light of day,
But in early as Herville sat confined in his cell,
(08:26):
a copy was taken out of the prison, ironically by
a follower, Mark Schinath, who was actually about to leave
Herville's cult. Mark wasn't taken in by the book, but
for some reason he decided to show it to other
cult members. And those cult members they took the book
and made copies. They did not see self congratulating rhetoric.
(08:51):
They saw scripture, prophecy, a kind of manifesto. And they
did not see complaints and rants. They saw a hit list.
Gary Remple was named in that list, so were others
from law enforcement, like Dick Forbes, the man most responsible
for Herbal's imprisonment, and many others fifty people in all,
(09:16):
and not just law enforcement. Many of the names were
Herbal's former followers, people who, while Irvill was in prison,
had decided to walk away from the colt, and when
the book fell in the hands of those still loyal
to Irvill, those followers decided they needed to act. The Opus,
(09:39):
in their eyes, was a binding covenant with God, and
the fifty or so named in it had to be
atoned to be saved from hell, and the only way
to do that was to kill them through blood atonement,
that act of spilling blood and taking lives to save
sinners from any ernity in Mormon hell outer darkness. Before
(10:06):
he died, Herbal summoned his most loyal sons to point
at the mountain. In a ritual common and Mormonism, he
laid his hands on their heads. He ordained his oldest son, Arthur,
as the new patriarch of the cult. Six other sons
from four different mothers were ordained as high priests, and
(10:27):
each made a solemn vow to their father. If he
were to fall, they would carry on the work he
had started. They would cleanse the world of God's enemies.
These sons would fulfill the Book of the New Covenant
(10:49):
from the team's at novel and I Heart Radio. This
is deliver Us from Herbal. I'm Jesse Hyde. Episode eight,
The Reign of Arthur. I was wondering if you drink
(11:11):
coffee or if you didn't drink coffee, since you're a
since you're what do you call yourself? I'm in the
home of Gabriella a Baron. You heard her voice in
episode six, I described her as a former fundamentalist. If
you're not harm anymore, do you start drinking coffee? Or yeah,
I drink coffee. We're in her apartment in Austin, Texas,
(11:34):
surrounded by her paintings, abstract art she constructs by patiently
adding and removing layers of paint. Each takes months to complete.
It's a therapeutic process. Gabriella isn't just any former fundamentalist.
All right, Oh we're on now, okay, um, So I'm
(11:54):
Gabriella le Baron and my father is Irvilla a Baron.
This will be the first time she has ever shared
her story of her life in the LeBaron cult publicly.
I'm not here with Gabriella because I want to understand
her father, Irville. I'm here because I want to understand
what happened after he died. Why the story doesn't end
(12:16):
with his death, How the reign of terror his cult
unleashed continued for decades, How it somehow got even worse,
and what has become of that cycle of violence today.
Gabriella was born in nineteen seventy six, the same year
as me. Her mother, Teresa, was the child of indigenous
(12:39):
Mexicans who had moved to colonial LeBaron when Teresa was
just a child. Herville had thirteen wives, and one of
those wives is tere Srius and that's my mom. She
had four daughters, and I am the youngest of those four.
I was told that my mother loved my father, and
(13:03):
I believe he loved her too, and that's what was
told to us. It may sound obvious that a husband
and wife would love each other, but in my reporting experience,
it's often not the case in polygamous relationships. She was
on his side no matter what, and it caused me
to also worship my dad as soon as I was.
For Gabriella, her father was an almost mythical figure, like
(13:26):
children naturally worship their parents, but my experience with my
dad was taken to a holy level because he actually
was the representation of God on earth. As soon as
I was four years old, they were telling us these
stories that he was a great prophet and that he
was sent on earth to do some big, powerful, important
(13:48):
work that was gonna basically save humanity in the last days.
The world is coming to an end. Armageddon is honest
way you're going to see it in your lifetime. Your
father was sent to earth and he is he is
like the reincarnation of Jesus basically. Okay, so he represents
God on earth and you are so lucky to be
(14:12):
this great person's daughter. Right from the beginning, Gabriella had
to live with paradox cognitive dissonance because that great person
who everyone around her revered was completely absent from her life.
When did you first start to realize that that you
didn't matter to him? I always felt sad because we
(14:35):
would read all the letters that he wrote about all
his kids, and he never mentioned me in any one
of them, and I always waited for my name to
come up, and it never never did. For him, I
basically didn't exist. I didn't matter. Gabriella has jet black hair,
just like her mother. She always had her hair short
and she's dark skinned. Her parents are Indigenous, her father
(14:59):
is mixed race. She was very quiet, one of those
long suffering types. For a time in the late seventies,
Gabriella lived with her mom in Denver, Colorado, but not
with her father, who at this point was a fugitive
from the law. Gabriella lived under the supervision of a
different patriarch, Evil's right hand man, Dan Jordan's. Her mom
(15:24):
worked at Dan's appliance business. She was kind of the
little slave of the family, and she had no concept
of any kind of personal rights or space or ownership
of anything. In episode one, when I visited Colonial LeBaron,
I talked about the feeling of safety, of belonging, how
(15:46):
that was the entire point of the town. Building a utopia,
a zion. That's what Irvill and Joel had started out
trying to build. But by the time Gabriella came along
in seventy six, the ripples emanating outwards from Joel's murder
and the massacre at Los Melinos meant the children and
(16:07):
Hervil's cult had none of those feelings of hope or security.
Gabriela's existence was shadowed by a terrible, unrelenting dread so
talk about, um, you know, your early childhood, your your
earliest memories. If there's kind of like an image that
pops into your mind when you think back to your
(16:29):
early years. Oh god, it's terrible. Um hiding in the
closet because we're getting rated, and I think we were
in Denver. I vaguely remember that in the years before
her dad's arrest in seventy nine, cops would regularly arrive
unannounced at cold houses in raids to search the property
for any signs of him or other cult members. They
(16:51):
were hunting down And I was hugging my niece in
a really old style, small closet and on a pile
of blankets, must have been like four or five blankets,
and I was hiding behind the clothes, and I was
freaking terrified because we were being raided. All of Herbal's
followers scattered all over the United States experienced this feeling
(17:14):
of being constantly hunted by the law, and they knew
what to do when they got that knock on the door.
Never never, never speak to the police, no matter what
you die, first before you speak to the police. The
police were like the Boogeyman. It was just like you
know there's a robber outside. You know somebody's gonna break
into your house and hurt you, steal your stuff. That's
(17:36):
what normal people are afraid of. I was afraid of
a policeman being outside and looking inside in order to
try and avoid the eyes of the law. Each time
cult members settled somewhere new, they transformed themselves. And all
those times that we moved around in the States, we
changed our names every single time, so I got really
(17:57):
good at adopting a new personality. It was five years
old or four years old, and I had a new name,
and they told me what my new name was, and
that's who I was, and I just melted into it.
Like other cult members, Gabrielle's childhood was spent moving from
city to city. The children were instructed to never speak
to strangers, to never leave the house, to never raise
(18:18):
the blinds. The adults went out and worked to earn
money for the colt, usually by repairing appliances. We were
left at home alone, and I think the oldest child
was about eight years old, and there must have been
about ten of us. The kids tried their best to
entertain themselves, but with no TV or radio, they had
(18:42):
to get creative. They would often break the rules and
venture into the backyard. I used to play in the
grass a lot. I used to love to try to
catch grasshoppers. It was one of my favorite things to do.
And they had a sprinkler on and then we were
out in the running in the sprinkler and jumping over
it and trying to catch grasshoppers. That was so much fun.
(19:04):
And I caught a little one, a tiny, little black grasshopper.
I put it in a jar with a bunch of grass.
I called it Blackie. And air Supply was playing a lot.
And then there was this one song that goes here,
I'm the one that you la la la la and forever.
I called that one the grasshopper song. And years later
(19:25):
I'd be like, oh, the grasshopper song and stolen moments
of childhood innocence. Across long board summers, the children of
herbal LeBaron would play together, and sometimes rays of light
broke through the darkness of cold life. We were all
in this house across the street, an empty house, a
(19:47):
vacant house, but they had a full swimming pool, so
we would run across the street. The pavement was so
hot our feet were always burning. So we'd run across
the street and go through the side gate to their backyard,
to nobody's backyard, and go and swim in their pool.
And we'd swim for hours and then come back up.
And then we do that every single day, and these
(20:08):
like whole little herd of kids running across the street
to swim in these people's empty house backyard swimming pool.
And then one day somebody moved in. It was terrible.
So two of the oldest kids decided to go and
ask for mission if we could swim. So one was
a boy when I was a girl. And they go
(20:29):
and they knock on the door and they're like, can
we swim in your pool? And it was a nice
looking young couple, and they said yes, of course, And
then they turned around. My siblings turned around to us
and said they said yes. And so all they heard
of kids come running across the street and swim for
hours and these people So that was the last time
(20:52):
we ever swim there. Oh god, mh. I mentioned earlier
that Gabrielle and I are the same age. Maybe that's
why when she tells these stories catching grasshoppers, listening to
air supply, it takes me right back to my childhood.
(21:14):
I feel that ache of nostalgia for the innocence of
encountering the world for the first time before it lets
us down, betrays us. And then I think about Gabriella
when the fear subsided for just a moment. How rare
and precious that time must have been. Moments of feeling safe.
(21:37):
For polygamus children sired by a man with countless other kids,
often the only place that really feels like home is mom.
Yet even in childhood, Gabriella could sense her mother was unraveling.
I was very conscious of how much my mother was suffering.
I was very careful to not ask anything of her. Basically,
(22:00):
you want to hold your breath all the time, because
even breathing might be too much. Her mother's descent left
Gabriella bereft, and I remember she was in her bedroom
on bed with the fever, and she was saying all
kinds of random nonsense, like schizophonic things, and we were
(22:21):
just I was just sitting at the end of Bitch
watching her and worrying about her and knowing that she
was out of it. She lost it completely. My mom
wasn't aware enough to be able to defend me. And
she had no rights even over her own children. Gabriella
had no rights either. She belonged to the cult. Would
you guys call yourselves the family? What did you guy?
(22:44):
Because there's no way you called thisselves the cold? Oh? No,
Coult wasn't even a word reknew of. There was no cult.
We were the Koug if anything. Yeah, we called ourselves.
Kg is the nickname for our cult, the Kingdom of God.
We were God's Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, or the Kog,
(23:16):
as it was known to its members. This is what
the cult started by Herville was now named. In just
a few years, some of the younger members wouldn't even
remember what the name Church of the Lamb of God
referred to. Long live the Kog. It was them versus
the outside world, who they called the gentiles, the infidels,
(23:40):
the enemy. That meant no friends outside the colt. Talking
to someone who didn't belong to the Kog was strictly forbidden.
When I was nine years old, I had made a
vow that I would give my life so nobody there
had a life to hold onto. Our lives, all of
our lives before fit already just by being in the
(24:01):
cult just by being born into it. You know, our family,
our well being, our money, where we're going to live,
how are we going to live ultimately? Our lives. And
when a person had to die, it was so that
person could be saved ultimately, so we didn't see it
is an evil, I think it wasn't death, wasn't terror.
(24:25):
You're going to be somewhere so much better, you know,
And if you don't do this, you probably could go
to hell forever in all eternity, which is the worst
possible thing that could happen to anybody. And when we
really really believe that so much so that we were
ready to give our lives for it, and we couldn't
have emotional attachment to each other because we would have
to let go of one another. We wouldn't know when
(24:47):
we would have to let go of our sister brother.
This was the law as laid out in the bulk
of the New Covenant, the law that would survive Evil's death,
in a law now in the hands of his eldest son, Arthur.
He was the son charged with leading the next generation.
(25:08):
That's after the break in the days after herbl LeBaron's
death late August, most of his wives and children living
(25:30):
in the US suddenly headed south. Hours later, a group
of the cult kids, teens, and a few adults across
the border into Mexico. Gabriella was five years old in
August one as she arrived in a remote corner of Sonora,
a vast and wild Mexican state which sits in the
(25:53):
upper northwest corner of the country. Her destination was about
eighty miles from the US border with r Zona. I
remember the night we showed up. It was like one
o'clock in the morning. It was a pitch dark, like
I can't even see my hand. There was no town.
In fact, there were no lights at all. Darkness was
(26:17):
so thick. I had never experienced that kind of darkness
ever in my life. He was so quiet and so
spooky and so scary and if people like be careful
because our sakes, and spiders and scorpions and all these
dangerous things. By the first light of day in Sonora,
Gabriella began to make out adobe ruins and an endless
(26:38):
expanse of mesquite brush and cactus, not all that different
from colonial LeBaron at its inception. This was to be
their new home. The ranch called Lahoya, or camp as
they called it. Gabriella had been told her mother would
be there in Mexico waiting. They believed it was okay
to tell children lies in order to get them stopped crying.
(27:00):
So I got there and she wasn't there, and that
was like a huge caving disappointment. Before his death, Merville
had passed his favorite son, Arthur, the mantle of the
one mighty and Strong. So when Hervill died, Arthur immediately
had leadership of the colt. For Arthur, this was a
(27:24):
heavy responsibility, but he shielded the kids from the weight
of the crown he now carried. He ran around, played
games with us. He promised us all kinds of cool playgrounds.
He promised us the world. Gabriella remembers Arthur as tall
and handsome, with wavy hair, and he's always wearing some
button down plaid shirt full of bright energy. He had
(27:47):
a lot of energy for me, so when he looked
at me, I could see the light in his eyes
in this smile and the love that he had for me.
He would pick me up in his arms and be
like Mike going to hit the un He would me
this big hug every time he came home from work,
and it was just as a child, I didn't get
that attention from anybody, not my father, not my uncle's
(28:09):
not There was no male figure that gave me that
kind of love or attention. Arthur was the only one.
So for him, I existed and I mattered, and of
course I ate that up. That was actually the only
really pure adult male relationship I had. He was loved.
We loved him to death, and we would definitely go
(28:31):
to the ends of the world for him and with him.
Irville had tried to build utopia in colonial A Baron
and then Los Molinos. He had failed spectacularly, but now
his son Arthur would try again. Here in Sonora. We
were inspired to do great things. He wanted to build
(28:52):
the ranch into some fabulous you know, treat these great
playgrounds and make sure the kids had a lot of fun.
He wanted to His idea of the Kingdom of God
was making a really fabulous place for us, and um
there was there was so exhilarating to think about and
to see the Kingdom of God as a giant playground.
(29:12):
If that didn't seem like the promise of Heaven to
a five year old, what would without many adults around,
the kids ran wild. They swam in the rough hewn
concrete pool that collected water for irrigation, and ran down
to the ocean, which was just a few miles away.
We were way off the grid, but we had music
on cassette tapes Sweet Caroline, no Diamond, Yeah, so we
(29:38):
had no Diamond, barber Strass and air supply Survivor Europe.
So then we started listening to Antonio, which I loved
because it was all about horses. And when I was
five years old, I loved horses and I wanted to
be a horse. I wanted to run like horse like
so bad. Yet, just like in colonial abeyance or early
(30:00):
days in Lahoya, the undercurrents of darkness and danger were
never far away. Caborca, the nearest town to the ranch,
belonged to the Mexican mafia. It had been a hideout
for drug and gun smugglers for a long time, and
they gave the colt safe haven to live there. Why
would the Mexican mafia give safe haven to a bunch
(30:22):
of Mormon fundamentalists, Well because by this point in Arthur
worked for them. In fact, pretty much the entire cult did.
While Irville and Dan Jordans had mostly funded their version
of the cult by entirely unexciting and unglamorous trades like
(30:42):
fixing up busted washing machines. The second generation of the COLT,
the Kog, they were more inventive. We have contacts at
the border, at the customers the other Onuana, and so
we funneled cars to the mafia and sold them. The
COLT would steal them to order for the drug cartels.
(31:03):
They paid are just prices for them. They're really paid
in cash too. Aside from these new contacts, the ranch
had some other regular visitors, a group of men who
were supposed to bring money down from the US to
support the Colt there. These visitors included two brothers, Raoul
(31:23):
and Gama Leo, known as the Rio's brothers, Gabriella's uncles
on her mother's side, and also a man named Leo Evaneck.
Leo Evanick was short and chubby, with a thin mustache
and graying hair. He sometimes wore horn rimmed glasses and
tried to look like an upstanding businessman, but he had
(31:46):
once been a drug smuggler. He'd been arrested off the
coast of San Diego with half a ton of marijuana
hidden in a boat. He was thrown in jail and
insnota Mexico, which is where he met irvill Le Baron,
and by the time he was released in n he
(32:06):
had converted to Evil's colt. Whenever Leo and this group
of men arrived at Lahoya, Gabriella and the other children
knew what to do hide. It was just a given
that the men would take advantage of the girls. The
(32:26):
men could do whatever they wanted. So we were in
a situation where there were a lot of predators and
there were no adults to protect the kids. The only
adults were the predators, and some of the kids were
like abused more than others, but everybody basically was affused.
There were mothers in the camp, and you'd think they'd
(32:47):
protect their children, but as Gabriella describes it, they were
mostly out of it, or like Gabriella's own mother, trying
to hold on to their last shreds of sanity, in
no position to help, and as far as Leo and
the Rio's brothers saw it, Hervil had already given them away.
(33:09):
They were promised this girl and that girl and all
that stuff. So they were like, Okay, she's mine, so
I have rights, you know, starting now. But Gabriella learned
something previous victims of the cold had realized. There was
no escape. We knew, like we'd sense the injustice, but
we couldn't do anything about it. So you go back
(33:31):
and remember that dislike God, It's terrific. And then mothers
getting killed. One of the mothers who was down. If
they tried to run away, they never they had a
plan to run away and to sneak off, and one
of the little kids would snitch the mother Gabriella is
talking about. Here is Laurena Shannath, sister to Rena, Mark, Joyne, Victor,
(33:55):
and Glenn, the first in that whole family to leave
the US for Mexico to marry hervill Le Baron by two.
The year following Hervil's death, Lorna had decided she wanted
out from Lahoya, out from the colt. One of the
(34:18):
kids in the colt had found out about her plans
for escaping their group, and that child had snitched on
her to one of the older teens. So on her
way out she was ambushed and killed. It's like nobody
could run away like anybody that tried to escape couldn't escape.
And um, we were indoctrinated that this was good, and we,
(34:41):
in our prayers prayed for the killing of the bad
people of the SPC. We were trained, heavily trained, kind
of like in a Spartanesque style s o p Son
of Perdition Kog the Kingdom of God, little kids born
(35:03):
into terror and abuse, raised up to fulfill the prophecies
contained in the Book of the New Covenant. And what
Gabriella would soon realize is that no one, not even Arthur,
her dearest protector, was safe. That's coming up after the break.
(35:38):
When Herville summoned his most loyal sons to point of
the Mountain prison in he wanted to clear up any
confusion about the future of his dynasty. He wanted to
establish a clear line of succession to Arthur. As an
(35:59):
attentive student of organized crime, he'd foreseen an oncoming power
vacuum while he was behind bars, and he knew some
cult members and wives were trying to quietly slip away.
Maybe naming a successor would stop at all breaking apart.
But he was too late. The cracks were already there,
(36:23):
and after his death in eighty one, they continued to widen.
What was once called the Church of the Lamb of
God disintegrated by three there were four distinct pieces factions.
It's like a mafia, right, so if you the mafia
breaks apart, one team goes against the other team, and
(36:46):
so that's what happened. So the danger was really high
now everybody was going to try to kill each other.
The first faction were mostly Chinats, that original family Hervil
had built his empire are upon Mark and Dwayne and
Vic and Rena Vic the money man, Mark and Dwayne
Colt assassin's and Rena, a once favored wife an assassin
(37:12):
who had ignored Herville's letters from prison. They'd all left
for Texas, along with another seasoned Hervil killer, Eddie Marston.
The second faction of this mafia split was led by
Dan Jordan's He had turned on Hervil and was starting
his own operation in Denver. What's more, Dan had given
(37:32):
refuge to one of Herville's wives, Anime Marston, after his death,
and so he had a bunch of the Labaran kids
living with him. So in the eyes of the ko G,
he was a threat to both those kids, their siblings
and their operation at Lahoya, and by eighty three there
was a third and final mafia faction that rivaled Arthur's Kog,
(37:54):
and this group was the most immediate threat to the Coult.
They were led by Leo Evanick. Unlike the other factions,
Leo had stayed loyal to Hervil, visiting him at Point
of the Mountain at least a dozen times, and like
Rvill's sons, he seemed to believe in the Book of
the New Covenant. Leo also accepted that Arthur now carried
(38:18):
the mantle of the One Mighty and Strong, as with
Joel and Hervill. At the beginning of this podcast, Leo
and Arthur initially made a good team. Arthur didn't say much,
but he had the followers, an army of half brothers
and sisters and little kids who would give their lives
for him. Leo, unlike Arthur, understood Rvill's intricate theology and
(38:41):
shared Hervill's ability to hold forth on doctrine for hours.
From their base in Mexico, Arthur and Leo started drafting letters,
just as Hervill would have done, threatening those other mafia
families who had broken from their late prophet. But over
time Arthur and Leo began to clash over money, wives,
(39:03):
matters of theology. It all seems so familiar. We started
to get the sense of being more afraid because now
this internal civil war was going on between our team,
Leo Evnick and my uncle's. They threatened to kill the
(39:23):
adults and to condapt the children. By the spring of
night three, the Kyog camp at Lahoya was split, those
who backed Leo and those who backed Arthur. And in
the middle were the children, the next generation of soldiers, devotees,
drug smugglers, car thieves, believers and assassins. The religious ideal
(39:47):
in our time and these in this cult, and this
is what all the adults believed in, even when they
were broke up. Art Kill the adults, get up the children,
because the children are the future. So the children were
the price gold. In the spring of eight three, a
group from the colt had set off from Lahoya to
make a trip to get groceries in Caborca, that nearby
(40:09):
mafia controlled town. While they were on the road, they
started getting shot. It so the guys came out and
they were like hiding and running and hiding, and one
of them got shot. Peers through the lake. They recognized
the shooters as Leo's men, the Rio's brothers, Gamaliel. I
don't know who else was there, but they're about five
(40:31):
other men. The Kog realized they were now at war
with Leo's faction, and it was extremely so scary. It's like,
oh my god, it's so scary. Not long after that ambush,
early one morning, before most of the children and mothers
of the camp had woken up, Leo, Raoul Rios and
(40:54):
other gunmen were spotted again. This time they were approaching
the Kog's camp camp. They were dressed in soldiers uniforms
and carried guns. We were just waking up, you know,
wiping her eyes still. One of the kids came running
fast as he could and suddenly like Leon, really fucking run.
(41:17):
I had one shoe on, one shoe off. I couldn't
untied the knot of my shoes. I can put it on.
I have to fix this knot so I can put
my shoe on, so I can go. And I was
trying to fix the knock oh, and everybody had gone
without me. And then one of them was like gabre
like comet of know. It's like, oh god, chimp out
the window just take your shoe with you. Oh God,
get me out of here fast. So we jumped through
the window and we ran to the cactus heell. The
(41:42):
cactus hill is where the children of the camp had
been trained to run for safety if they came under fire.
It was a sort of briar patch with a chola cactus.
Choya is the meanest cactus that you could ever imagine.
There's a little tiny needles. It's a ball with needles,
and they just they stick in you so hard you
have to have pliers to pull them out really hard.
(42:05):
And we ran into it, some people barefoot, some people
choose on and I ran with my shoot. And there
are tiny little empty spaces. The tiny little trails could
have been rabbit trails or something where you could put
your foot and try to avoid the cactus. And then
it would be like cactus arms everywhere, So you're gonna
(42:26):
have to like move around and then find one little
like three by three little space where you can just
stop and hide. The children and the rest of the
kog hid in the cactus fields, holding their breath as
the gunmen passed by, and then they heard them moving
(42:46):
away from where they hid. Eventually there was silence. The
attack was over. No casualties on that occasion, but after
that the redoubled their vigilance against attack. The kids of
the camp would stay up all night on watch duty.
We'd take turns guarding, keeping watch with binoculars, because you
(43:09):
could see when there's somebody coming. You could see so
far out and it's flat and everything is really flat,
so if there's a car coming, you could see the
headlights moving around right miles and miles and miles away,
so there would be somebody watching for headlights, if the
dogs bark, and these kinds of things would start to
happen before the attack happened. That summer, there were three
(43:34):
attacks on the camp by Leo's men. Eventually, Gabriella's mother
persuaded Arthur to send her to Dallas to live with her.
But even in Dallas, Gabriella didn't feel safe. If somebody
knocks on the door, it could be your uncle role
so do not answer. You need to go to the
back room and call the shop. Now. We will come
here as fast as we can. And so we lived
(43:58):
with this terror that we home alone and some evil
people might show up. And they were really evil and
they had chosen the devil's side, and they were dangerous now,
and they could kidnap you and take you away and
you'll never see us again. It was completely terrifying. Gabriella
was back to hiding in closets. Now it was her
(44:20):
own family members causing the panic and terror. She sat
with her sister Jenny, hiding, sitting as silently as she
could for hours, and then would hear sounds, footsteps, something rattling,
fucking scared. And then if we forgot to close occur
in during the daytime, when the night came, we're like,
somebody could be out the window looking inside. Oh God,
(44:41):
and we couldn't move because we couldn't be in the
sight of that window. So we would just stay in
that one little crack of the house until the adult
came home. At the end of the war between Arthur
and Leo came to a head. On the morning of
December nineteen, Arthur returned to Lahya mac Ago after a
trip to Dallas. Arthur actually had this premonition that it
(45:05):
was going to happen. He told his wife that he
knew he was gonna die in a few days, and
he went down to the ranch and remember the ranches
of really big clearing and there are these two big trees.
When Arthur arrived, Leo and the Rio's brothers were waiting
for him, and I think they assaulted him. Under those trees.
(45:28):
Near the trees was a new airstream trailer Arthur had
stolen and smuggled across the border. All the kids were
in there, so one of one of the moms or
one of the adults were there. They closed all the
curtains and didn't and locked the kids inside because they
knew what was going to happen. The kids would have
gone out to fight for Arthur, but they were allowed
(45:51):
to go out um and Arthur was They beat him
and he was yelling for help, and they shot him
and they loaded in the back of the pickup truck
and buried his body at the side of the road
under a few inches of sand. And Gabriella was in
Dallas during the killing. An older sister broke the news.
(46:12):
You were in the car, and she just said, I
have to tell you the Arthur's been killed. And I froze,
like my whole body went like cold, white, frozen. Don't
tell anybody that you know that was it. I had
to walk around pretending like I didn't know something that
just my favorite person in the world was just killed.
You can't feel emotions, You can't more than anybody that's gone.
(46:36):
And you have to be ready to do the killing
yourself if it's required you So like you wait five
six seven years old, you're already being taught this. Gabriella
was now seven seven years old. It's hard to comprehend
all she had seen and experienced in so few years,
(46:59):
and now her only protector in the world was gone.
And then shortly after that, my mother had a mental breakdown,
and so she left. Where did she go? She was
picked up by the police on the streets, and then
she was put in a mental hospital. That was it,
(47:21):
and I never saw her. In Gabriella's short life so far,
fear had never been far away. In brief moments, like
a montage in a movie, she had felt happiness, safety,
holding a grasshopper, being carried on Arthur's back, running across
(47:45):
the asphalt on a hot summer day to jump in
a neighbor swimming pool. But her constant companions were always
waiting for her terror and dread. Now they were almost
becoming a part of her, I stopped talking to people.
(48:05):
I mean I could talk, but if you asked me
a question, I wouldn't answer. I just like go stone cold.
I didn't have the ability to move my vescle listen answer.
And it frustrated all the adults because they were like,
we just it's okay, you're not in trouble. I couldn't
physically talk, but I don't remember anything else. I don't
remember feeling anything, and feel sadness, I'm feel anything, just
(48:31):
kind of freeze up. And he moved around like furniture
wherever you're supposed to go. With her mother gone, Gabriella
went back to LaToya. Arriving at that camp in Sonora,
she joined up with cult members who are now under
new leadership. Once Arthur had been killed, they'd immediately turned
(48:53):
the Book of the New Covenant for direction to them.
It's spelled out exactly what should happen. If Arthur was
cut down, the one mighty and Strong would pass on
to the next male heir. So Hebrew the mantle fell
on him, and he did not sign up for it.
(49:13):
Arthur's half brother, a teenager named William Hebrew LeBaron, he
had inherited Hervil's good looks in his height, but not
his interest in theology. See, Hebrew didn't study. He was
not one of those kind of guys. He was more
of a party like a rock star type of guy.
He was much more interested in helping the family develop
(49:33):
their ties with the Mexican mafioso's cars, drugs, whatever they
were into, he was into. Hebrew liked to party, he drank,
He did coke and marijuana. He seemed like he was
about to escalate the cults activities into uncharted new hedonistic territory.
But the thing is in the cult, is it? A
(49:55):
Christian can't do that? But how do you tell that
to the one mining and stronge That's coming up in
the next episode of deliver Us from Herville. Deliver Us
(50:23):
from Herville is hosted by me jesse Hyde and written
and reported by me Leona Hamid and David Waters. Production
from Leona Hamid and David Waters. Sean Glenn and Max
O'Brien are executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Oyinka are researchers.
Marianna Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking by Donya
(50:46):
Suleman and Sona Avakian production management from Sharie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolf Austin Mitchell is our creative director of Production.
Micha Lee Raw is our managing at a R. Gavin
Haynes is our Head of Development. Willard Foxton is our
creative director of Development. Mix scoring and sound design by
(51:10):
Eli Block Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters.
Our music is composed by Julian Lynch. Special thanks to
Scott Anderson, Scott Carrier, Del van Ada, Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards,
Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvelle and beth An Makaluso, or In Rosenbaum,
(51:31):
Shelby Shankman and all the team at U t A.
For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio
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Dateline NBC
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.