Kirtland cult killings: Looking back at Lake County's worst mass murder, 25 years later

The News-Herald, Ohio/December 30, 2014

 By David Glasie

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a four-part series looking back at the events surrounding what would become known as “The Kirtland Cult Killings” and the recollections 25 years later of the local authorities who were faced with the aftermath.

The sights, smells and sounds experienced 25 years ago in a Kirtland barn still linger in the minds of those who were there.

On Jan. 3 and 4, 1990, Steve LaTourette, Ron Andolsek, Karen Kowall, Dan Dunlap and Ron Walters participated in or witnessed the unearthing of the bodies of a family of five at the barn at 8671 Chardon Road. The bodies would be identified at those of Dennis Avery, his wife, Cheryl, and their daughters, 15-year-old Trina, 13-year-old Rebecca and 7-year-old Karen.

Thus began the saga of what came to be known as the “Kirtland cult killings,” the worst mass murder in the history of Lake County.

“The smell of death hung in the air,” said LaTourette, then the Lake County prosecutor. He later would serve 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and now heads a moderate conservative advocacy firm in Washington, D.C.

“We knew what was coming out of the ground. We were fairly certain it was the Averys,” said Andolsek, then a patrolman for the Kirtland Police and now an investigator for the Lake County Coroner’s office.

Dunlap was a lieutenant in the Lake County Sheriff’s Office at the time. Now the sheriff, he was a patrol officer on the day Kirtland Police Chief Dennis Yarborough requested assistance from the Sheriff’s Office and the Lake County Crime Lab in processing the crime scene on Chardon Road.

“The place was damp, cold, dark and full of trash and rubble, so there was a lot of clearing going on,” said Dunlap. “They found the bodies beneath layers of soil, rocks and garbage in the rear portion of the barn’s lower level.”

Walters, now a captain in the Sheriff’s detective bureau, was a deputy working special services in January 1990.

“The chief deputy called the night before and told me to be at the barn in Kirtland by 7 in the morning because the police there thought they’d found a mass grave,” Walters said.

“One of the things I remember is dealing with all the water running off into the area where we were digging,” he added.

Kowall was the prosecutor’s chief assistant in the Criminal Division then and holds that job today.

Having accompanied LaTourette to the crime scene, she was struck not just by the smell in the barn but by the discovery of Avery family personal items in the piles of garbage moved to enable the exhumation.

Those items included drawings and notebooks that once belonged to Trina, Rebecca and Karen Avery.

“There were some pretty seasoned law enforcement officers there that day, and I remember the effect it had on them when it was clear the children had been murdered, too,” Kowall said.

The Averys, one by one, had been bound, gagged and gunned down in cold blood almost nine months earlier by Jeffrey Lundgren.

Lundgren, 39, lived in the century-old house adjacent to the barn on the 15-acre rental property.

The Missouri native had moved to Kirtland in 1984 to take a job at the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ Kirtland Temple.

He was a self-proclaimed prophet who gathered around himself a small band of followers and molded them into a paramilitary religious cult.

Although the Averys were among his followers and had given or signed over to him tens of thousands of dollars, Lundgren had determined that Dennis Avery, in particular, was threatening his hold over the other cult members and thus had to be sacrificed.

Lundgren used his twisted interpretation of Scripture and powers of persuasion to enlist other cult members in the plan to kill the Averys.

On the evening of April 17, 1989, having been invited to a party in advance of the group leaving for a “wilderness trip” with prophetic underpinnings, the Averys arrived at the house occupied by Lundgren and other cult members.

Within three hours, they all were dead.

Path to perdition

The Kirtland Police were well-acquainted with Jeffrey Lundgren long before he was identified as the triggerman in the murder of the Averys.

Yarborough kept a file on Lundgren that included notes about how he was fired from his job at Kirtland Temple for stealing anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 in Temple funds. He also was defrocked as a lay minister for teachings counter to RLDS doctrine.

There was evidence Lundgren was building a cache of weapons and ammunitions.

In addition to complaints about gunfire and military-style drills at the Chardon Road farm, there were tips from two informants that Lundgren planned to arm himself and a group of followers with those weapons in a planned May 1988 takeover of the Temple.

Charles E. Coulson, now the Lake County prosecutor, was law director of Kirtland from 1980 to 1995.

“Dennis (Yarborough) cared deeply about his community and always took the threat seriously, even when some people thought he was over-reacting and chasing goblins,” Coulson said.

“In the face of all the doubters, Dennis believed we had a problem in Kirtland and it might blow up in our faces,” Coulson added. “He was a consummate chief, very knowledgeable.”

Throughout 1988, Yarborough apprised Coulson of information trickling in about Lundgren and goings-on at the house Lundgren shared with his wife, Alice, their four children and upwards of eight followers.

All of the followers, including the Averys, shared Missouri roots with Lundgren and moved here to have access to him and his nightly Scripture classes at the house.

“The ‘cult’ term wasn’t being used at that point, but there were discussions of Lundgren thinking he was a prophet and being able to have people just give him their money,” Coulson said.

Andolsek remembers his first face-to-face meeting with Lundgren in April 1988. It came after neighbors complained about a large flock of geese migrating from the farm to adjacent properties.

“Beyond the fact his stomach was hanging way over his belt, there was nothing remarkable about him physically,” Andolsek said. “Based on the conversation we had, I thought he was anti-government and anti-police.”

Tragedy unfolds

On May 2, 1988, Yarborough confronted Lundgren about the planned assault on Kirtland Temple. Informants had said the assault was set for May 3, Lundgren’s 38th birthday.

Although the assault never took place, Kirtland police maintained a close watch on Lundgren and his followers over the next year.

With reports of gunfire and suspicious activity at the farm continuing to reach his desk, Yarborough asked the FBI to join his department in going to 8671 Chardon Road to conduct interviews with the house’s residents.

The chief also intended to learn more about the arsenal Lundgren reportedly had acquired.
That visit took place on the morning of April 18, 1989.

Andolsek, who was there with Yarborough, other Kirtland police officers and an estimated 16 FBI agents, said there was no reason for the large contingent of investigators to suspect the Averys had been murdered and buried in the barn the previous evening.

The questions directed at cult members focused on the Temple assault plot — they all denied its existence — and their relationships with Lundgren — they all said no coercion was involved and they were there of their own free will.

None of the Lundgrens or cult members said anything to investigators about the Averys, let alone betray the slightest hint of what had happened at the house the night before.

Soon after the investigators left, so did Lundgren and his followers. By the morning of April 19, they were on their way to a remote campsite in West Virginia.

As would later be revealed, the visit by police and FBI agents spooked Lundgren and his followers into believing the authorities were on the verge of figuring out the Averys hadn’t been accounted for during the previous day’s interviews.

In fact, the family of five had vanished from the face of the Earth virtually without notice.

At no point in days, weeks and months to come did any relative, friend or acquaintance of the Averys come forth to file a missing persons report.

Andolsek said investigators regarded the Averys as fringe members of the cult and assumed they’d left the area, either with other Lundgren followers or on their own.

“Looking back on it now, it was a sad situation with the Averys. But they were always pretty much off to themselves,” Andolsek said.

On Dec. 31, 1989, Yarborough was contacted by U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The agents informed Yarborough that Keith Johnson, a former cult member whose wife, Kathryn Johnson, had left him to take up with Lundgren, voluntarily came in to tell them about Lundgren and the murders of the Averys.

Johnson provided a hand-drawn map of the barn on he property, complete with a diagram of where and how the five bodies were buried.

Three days later, Yarborough had secured search warrants for the garage.

As dusk gave way to darkness on Jan. 3, Yarborough and Andolsek stood astride the burial pit as members of Kirtland’s police and fire departments carefully pulled soil, rocks and debris away from the remains of Dennis Avery.

Yarborough, a fitness fanatic, died in 1998 while jogging. Dunlap believes the man he called “the epitome of a small-town chief” never quite shook the pain he internalized from the Avery killings.

Grim task

The working group inside the barn on that grim January day also included Lake County Crime Lab investigators Rick Kent and Dave Greene, Painesville-based FBI agent Bob Albord and three ATF agents.

With representatives from an ever-growing number of local and national media outlets gathering outside the barn, the general attitude inside was purposeful, according to Dunlap.

“It was pretty dispassionate. I didn’t hear anger being expressed. I heard a lot about working together and preserving the evidence,” Dunlap said.

“I’d been in law enforcement 19 years at that point, been at a lot of death scenes and learned that at some point, the bodies become evidence,” he added.

Walters said he adopted a similar attitude as the Averys were disinterred.

“It bothered me that night when I got home and took off my clothes in the garage so I wouldn’t carry that smell into the house,” he said.

“Then you look at your kids and you can’t help but think of those kids who were killed,” he added. “But I don’t dwell on that. I dwell on catching the bad guy.”

Walters threw away the clothes he was wearing inside the barn. Dunlap burned the old snowmobile suit he chose to wear.

LaTourette, the father of two young children in April 1990, said he felt anger welling up inside him as the bodies were removed from the pit.

In the next 24 hours, LaTourette would turn that anger into action.

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