Kirtland cult killings: Criminals quickly prosecuted

The News-Herald, Ohio/December 30, 2014

By David Glasier

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second 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 wheels of justice turned quickly, some would say remarkably so, in the Kirtland cult killing case.

Slightly less than 12 months elapsed between Jan. 3 and 4, 1990, when five bodies were found buried in a Chardon Road barn, and Dec. 20, 1990, when a guilty verdict was delivered in the last of four jury trials tied to the worst mass murder in the history of Lake County.

The man at the center of this swirl of legal activity was Steve LaTourette, then 35 years old and beginning his second year as Lake County prosecutor.

“There was no playbook to go by because something like this hadn’t happened before in Lake County. I was a relatively new prosecutor in a place where not many major cases come up in a year,” LaTourette said recently in a telephone interview.

On the morning of Jan. 5, 1990, hours after five bodies were removed from the crude burial pit, LaTourette secured from the county grand jury a multi-count aggravated murder indictment against self-styled prophet and cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren.

Lundgren, the indictment charged, was the mastermind and triggerman in the April 17, 1989, shooting deaths of Dennis Avery, his wife, Cheryl, and their daughters, 15-year-old Trina, 13-year-old Rebecca and 7-year-old Karen.

The Prosecutor’s Office also obtained multi-count felony indictments against Lundgren’s wife, Alice, his 19-year-old son, Damon and cult members Richard Brand, Sharon Bluntschly, Kathryn Johnson, Daniel Kraft, Ronald Luff, Susan Luff, Deborah Olivarez, Dennis Patrick, Tonya Patrick and Gregory Winship.

Charges against the 12 accomplices ranged from conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, complicity to aggravated murder and kidnapping.

“Steve felt very, very strongly this was a capital case and wanted to make sure we had the right combinations of charges in the indictments,” said Karen Kowall, then and now the chief assistant in the Prosecutor’s Office’s Criminal Division.

Those indictments were accompanied by the issuance of arrest warrants for Lundgren and his alleged accomplices.

Inside of one week, all of the suspects were in police custody.

“I’ll leave judgments about the speed of this process to others, but I will say we had dedicated teams of lawyers and law enforcement professional working closely together to make sure justice was served in this terrible crime,” LaTourette said

By April 13, 1990, when Jeffrey Lundgren was processed into Lake County Jail after delays in his extradition from California, LaTourette had secured the first plea deal with one of the indicted cult members.

With benefit of hindsight, that plea deal helped place Jeffery Lundgren on the road to Death Row.

The dominoes fall

Richard Brand was 26 years old when he was arrested in connection with the Avery murders.

A college graduate with a degree in civil engineering, Brand belonged to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. or RLDS for short.

He first met Jeffery Lundgren in May 1985 while touring the Kirtland Temple, an RLDS shrine. Brand would soon after move from Missouri to Kirtland to join Lundgren’s band of followers.

Brand found work as an engineer with the City of Mentor. The same as many of the cult members, he was signing over his paychecks to Lundgren and living with Lundgren and his family on a 15-acre rental property in Kirtland. The property included a century-old house and barn.

Brand was in the barn when the Averys were murdered there on the night of April 17, 1989.
Jeffrey Lundgren was the triggerman, but Brand, by his own admission in subsequent testimony, was a willing accomplice. His job was to help bind and gag the victims before they were shot.

Brand was in the first group of seven cult members interviewed by LaTourette and Kowall in Kansas City, Missouri.

“These people told us they believed in Lundgren, were part of his group and believed they had to do this (murder the Averys) for religious reasons,” Kowall said.

John O’Donnell, then as assistant prosecutor, was involved in the process that had Brand, angling to avoid a life sentence, agree to plead guilty to five counts of complicity to aggravated murder in exchange for testimony against Jeffrey Lundgren and other cult members.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is an intelligent guy, seemingly as normal as the day is long. How could he have let himself get involved with (Lundgren)?’” O’Donnell said.

In November 2014, O’Donnell won election as judge in the Lake County Common Pleas Court. He’ll be sworn in Jan. 5.

In the trial of Jeffery Lundgren, Brand offered a chilling, meticulous account of how the Averys were brought to the barn, gunned down and buried in a pit.

Plea deals in exchange for testimony also were struck with Bluntschly, Susan Luff, Olivarez and Winship.

“It was a matter of balancing levels of knowledge and culpability as we sought information about a particularly hideous crime,” said Richard Collins, then an assistant prosecutor and now a Lake County Common Pleas Court judge.

Trials unfold

Alice Lundgren was the first to face a jury trial, followed by Damon Lundgren, Jeff Lundgren and Ronald Luff.

LaTourette was the master strategist in the prosecutions of the four defendants, but he willingly delegated responsibilities to assistant prosecutors in individual jury trials.

Lake County Juvenile County Judge Karen Lawson in January 1990 was on LaTourette’s staff as an assistant prosecutor.

“Like it was yesterday, I remember walking into Steve’s office and saying, ‘I want the wife,’” Lawson said.

LaTourette gave Lawson the first chair on the Alice Lundgren trial and selected Sandra Dray, another assistant prosecutor, as second chair.

“We were good lawyers and he trusted us with the case,” Lawson said.

LaTourette was the lead attorney in the Jeffrey Lundgren trial.

“We kept waiting for the insanity defense, but it never came,” LaTourette said.

Kowall was second chair in what to that point was the highest-profile murder trial in the county’s history.

“Steve was masterful,” Kowall said. “He approached it by not putting religion as the crux of his case. He showed Jeff Lundgren for who he was, a master manipulator and greedy, egocentric individual.”

LaTourette also was the lead attorney in the Ronald Luff trial, held in Lucas County after Luff’s lawyer successfully argued for a change in venue.

The first three trials were held in Lake County Common Pleas Court.

Judge Paul Mitrovich presided over the Alice Lundgren and Damon Lundgren trials, Judge Martin Parks over the Jeffrey Lundgren and Ronald Luff trials.

“There was no Court TV back then, but I still was concerned with the intensity of media coverage of the (Jeffrey) Lundgren trial,” said Parks, who retired from the bench in 2002.

Parks said LaTourette’s decision to present clothing remnants removed from the Averys as evidence in open court left a lasting impression.

“It took days to get that smell out of the courtroom,” he said.

Parks said he was impressed by the work of lawyers on both sides of the two cases over which he presided.

Jeffrey Lundgren was represented by Lake County Public Defender R. Paul LaPlante and his chief assistant, Charles R. Grieshammer.

After LaPlante’s death two years ago, Grieshammer succeeded him as the county’s public defender.

“This was a case everybody thought we would lose, especially since Jeff never denied he killed the Averys,” Grieshammer said.

Guilty verdicts were rendered in all four of the jury trials. Lundgren received the death sentence.

All four of the verdicts were appealed. None of the appeals was upheld.

Final justice

As was his prerogative by law, LaTourette chose to be present on Oct. 24, 2006, when Jeffrey Lundgren was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.

He felt not one twinge of sympathy as Lundgren was strapped into the gurney and administered the mixture of drugs that ended his life.

“The guy was a grifter and a cold-blooded murderer. He deserved to die,” LaTourette said.

His thoughts did turn to the five people who’d perished at Lundgren’s hands 16 years before in that Kirtland barn.

“How sad it was for this family drawn together by love and devotion to be totally destroyed,” LaTourette said.

Also present at the execution was Charles Coulson, who succeeded LaTourette as Lake County prosecutor in 1995 after LaTourette was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Coulson had his own history with the Kirtland cult killing case. He was Kirtland’s law director from 1980 to 1995. As prosecutor, he argued the county’s position in appeals of the jury verdicts.

“It was my first execution, and I was impressed by the way the State of Ohio handled the process with such professionalism and dignity,” Coulson said.

“I didn’t think Lundgren deserved that dignity,’’ Coulson added. “By any standard, he embodied consummate evil.”

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