Cult slayings still haunting 10 years later

Associated Press/April 11, 1999

LEVELAND -- Ron Luff says he had become so brainwashed that he never considered helping five people who were massacred by a preacher who thought he was making a sacrifice to his Lord.

On April 17, 1989, Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their three teen-age daughters were killed execution-style in a barn in Kirtland by cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren.

On the night the family was killed, Luff carried the youngest girl, Karen, on his shoulders to meet her death.

"I've been through that scenario a hundred times or more," Luff told The Plain Dealer for a story Sunday. "I could have put them in a car and taken off. But was that a consideration? A viable option? No."

Previously, none of the cult members would talk about what became known as the Kirtland cult slayings. But as the 10th anniversary of the slayings approaches, some are speaking for the first time about how religious fervor and power could lead to cold-blooded murder.

"I still don't know what happened," said Susan Luff, Ron Luff's estranged wife. "Something went terribly wrong."

Lundgren is currently on Ohio's death row. Nine of his followers in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an offshoot of Mormonism, are in prisons scattered across the state.

Lundgren relocated his family from Missouri to Kirtland in 1984 to work as a tour guide at the church's original temple. Within months, he said that God had told him to lead a revolution in Kirtland, a quiet semi-rural town 20 miles east of Cleveland.

He broke from the church and began gathering followers of his own. Among them were Ron and Susan Luff, a young couple who uprooted their two children in Missouri so that the family could follow Lundgren, who impressed them with his goodwill.

"We were supposed to help the hungry. We were supposed to help the poor," Susan Luff told the newspaper in an interview at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. "Of course, none of that happened."

Lundgren, who often wore military fatigues and kept a rifle within reach, demanded money from his followers, sometimes pointing a gun at their heads.

He forced Susan Luff to dance nude for him in the woods as he sat naked behind a sheet. She believed him when he said it was the way of God.

According to cult members, nearly anything could be a sin: from adding too much garlic to a meal to, as Dennis Avery did, keeping money for yourself.

Lundgren told his followers that in order to see God they would have to seize the Kirtland temple and kill anyone who tried to stop them. Later, however, Lundgren revised that plan and said sacrificing the Avery family would be enough to reach their goal.

Luff and other cult members still don't understand Lundgren's rationale for killing the Averys, whose bodies were found in January 1990 buried in a barn in Kirtland.

During his trial, Lundgren said he had a vision indicating that God wanted the family sacrificed. Luff, who has wrestled with his faith for years, justifies his own role in the killings in spiritual terms. He has since embraced mainstream Christianity.

"Hatred is the truest definition of murder," he said. "I know that I did not hate the Avery family. In that sense I feel that I'm pretty much at peace with them as well."

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