[suspenseful music]
SCOTT: A man walks into the appliance repair shop.
Mark Chynoweth is in there by himself.
♪♪ ♪♪
And the killer opens fire.
[gunshots]
♪♪ ♪♪
Simultaneously, Eddie Marston
is at a house in an Irving neighborhood.
A black Silverado pickup truck pulls up, a guy gets out...
♪♪ ♪♪
Shoots Eddie Marston dead.
♪♪ ♪♪
While those two murders are happening,
a black Silverado pickup truck pulls up on Rena Street.
♪♪ ♪♪
Gunman gets out...
♪♪ ♪♪
Shoots Duane Chynoweth dead in the driveway.
[gunshot]
[gunshots]
LINDSAY: Sitting in the pickup truck
is eight-year-old Jenny Chynoweth,
who just witnessed her father being murdered.
SCOTT: The little girl, Jennifer, starts screaming.
[muffled screaming]
The killer reaches in through the window
and just shoots her point-blank range in the head.
[gunshot]
♪♪ ♪♪
[tires squealing]
♪♪ ♪♪
[unsettling string music]
♪♪ ♪♪
- This was the first time
in all of the years I lived with Mark and Lillian
I did not have to go to work sick.
But I was going to have to stay home
and take care of the kids.
[suspenseful music]
EMILY: Like a typical summer day,
I'm home with my siblings in Houston, 12 years old.
School's out.
Was outside playing basketball,
and the phone was ringing.
[telephone ringing]
- And it was one of the men that worked for Mark.
And he's like, Anna, are you and the kids okay?
I was like, yes.
And he's like, there's a truck and a car coming.
They'll be at your house any minute.
Get the children, gather them up,
and you get in the cars as quickly as you can.
♪♪ ♪♪
The energy just leaves your body,
and your knees are shaking.
Everything just starts shaking.
♪♪ ♪♪
- I came in, and I said, well, you know, what happened?
She told me that, now I just need you to listen
and do what I'm saying.
I knew instantly.
This was, like, the dreaded day.
I thought, my dad's dead.
- I have that awareness, too, that this was probably our dad.
[crying] I just remember just, like, hitting my knees
and just praying that nothing was happening,
you know, to Dad.
Like, God, please protect my dad.
Please don't let this be.
- I gathered up the kids as quickly as I could.
I start, you know, getting them out the door.
♪♪ ♪♪
I have no idea what's going on,
but my worst nightmares, I know, are coming true.
♪♪ ♪♪
REPORTER: In Texas, 4 people were murdered
in separate attacks within 15 minutes.
In Houston, Mark Chynoweth was shot dead behind the counter
of his secondhand store.
- We do not know what the motive for it is.
We have been told by several persons
that he was a member
of some type of a fraternal organization.
- Three middle-class businessmen,
one innocent eight-year-old child,
all killed in the same day,
all killed about the same time,
all shot by weapons of destructive caliber.
Even in Houston, which has more than its fair share
of homicides, this is...
this is different.
- These murders get dubbed "the 4 o'clock murders."
The press picks it up.
And June 27 at 4:00
is not just any time for Mormons.
It's the exact time Mormon founder
and prophet Joseph Smith was killed in Carthage Jail
by an angry mob.
- The homicides, all three, were very well organized.
And they almost always want to make sure
the victim was at some place
where they felt comfortable or normal.
These are assassinations.
SCOTT: They were carrying these murders out
in broad daylight.
What the killers decided to do was,
they would all wear matching disguises,
and they would all have the same stolen pickup truck
that they would be driving.
So, if there were eyewitnesses, and there were,
all the descriptions would perfectly match.
Somebody had really thought this thing through
and really planned.
♪♪ ♪♪
LINDSAY: So now police are left with,
who would have come up with such a coordinated
and complex plot to execute these men at the same time?
♪♪ ♪♪
[dramatic music]
ANNA: They bring all the kids to this friend's house.
Nobody will tell me what's going on,
and I'm like, can you please tell me what's going on?
We have to just wait. You have to just wait.
EMILY: It was actually the pastor of our church--
his wife gathered us together in this friend's living room,
just said it really straight to all of us.
- "I hate to tell you kids, but your dad's dead."
And there was just, like...
[voice breaking] Just this-- just horrible, like, wailing.
To this day, that sound never leaves.
- [voice breaking] I knew that I didn't want Celia
to find out about Mark from anyone else but me.
♪♪ ♪♪
- She says, Celia, Mark has been shot.
♪♪ ♪♪
[inhales sharply] And my knees just grow weak,
and I lose it.
♪♪ ♪♪
And then we find out that Duane
and his little daughter Jenny
and our half-brother Ed were also murdered.
♪♪ ♪♪
SCOTT: When police talked to the families,
they started figuring out the connection.
They learned about this hit list.
They had a sense of who was behind this.
♪♪ ♪♪
- We knew, and no one had to tell us.
- No one had to tell us. - We didn't have to ask.
- Yeah.
- It was other parts of our family.
Other people that we loved... ANNA: Mm-hmm.
- Were killing these precious humans
that we adored. ANNA: Mm-hmm, yeah.
This time, when the authorities and the police
are asking me to name names and identify people...
♪♪ ♪♪
I was able to say who I knew and what I knew.
I didn't have to say, I don't know.
We knew they were blood atonements.
- They were carrying out our father's revelations
from The Book of the New Covenant.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Chynoweth and Marston families were devout followers
of Ervil LeBaron.
But apparently they defected--
a sin, according to LeBaron religious doctrine.
Some people close to that sect would say that on June 27th,
they were punished for their sin.
♪♪ ♪♪
- After they had interviewed the Chynoweth family,
there were people that they suspected of being involved,
specifically the group
called the Kingdom of God on Earth, the KOG,
that's run by Heber LeBaron,
along with his brother Aaron in Mexico.
Law enforcement was puzzled by these four murders in Texas.
They needed more information in order to understand
how this could happen the way it happened.
And being the lead Assistant U.S. Attorney at the time,
it became my responsibility
to coordinate things from here.
It was a really tough case.
Houston PD did not have a lot of evidence to work with--
no fingerprints, no positive identifications.
They were getting nowhere.
LINDSAY: They knew who ordered the murders,
but they couldn't arrest him,
because Ervil LeBaron had been dead
for over seven years.
♪♪ ♪♪
[dramatic music]
- After Mark died, we all got to go home--
me and the children--to be with Lillian at our house.
We know that it's possible
that somebody could come after her, too.
- There was a very compelling belief
that my mother, Lillian,
was supposed to be killed the same day,
that they would come back and kill her.
And because a child had been killed,
would more children be killed?
- We were absolutely terrified.
And there's a SWAT team surrounding our house.
They had installed motion-detection lighting.
We could not go outside at all.
♪♪ ♪♪
And I'm at the iron downstairs,
helping get the clothes ready for the funeral.
And all of a sudden...
all the lights go out in the house,
and we are left in pitch-dark.
- When the lights went out, it felt like,
wait a minute, the security's failed.
EMILY: Yeah.
- We were in the pitch-black, just crawling.
♪♪ ♪♪
ANNA: I'm scrambling around. I find Celia, and we're like--
CELIA: We go hide in the bathtub.
ANNA: We go hide in the bathtub.
We make ourselves as small as we can.
CELIA: Barely breathing.
ANNA: We're just shaking with fear, thinking,
somebody's going to come in here and shoot me.
- I thought people were going to burst in and start shooting.
EMILY: Burst in and murder us, for sure.
[suspenseful music]
ANNA: Time passes.
And then all of a sudden, the lights come back on.
♪♪ ♪♪
And it was faulty wiring with the motion detectors.
♪♪ ♪♪
- After the 4 o'clock murders,
we were still in Denver,
and we were...
still trying to live our lives,
but we knew my mom, Anna Mae,
was on that hit list.
So, at the age of 13,
I was given a gun.
♪♪ ♪♪
Whenever my mom answered the door,
I was to aim that gun out the living-room window.
And if it was any of my siblings,
if you saw anybody draw a gun, you were to pull the trigger.
♪♪ ♪♪
HYRUM: It was understood, there was probably
going to be somebody coming trying to kill us,
so you have to shoot first.
You shoot to kill.
- We were petrified.
We thought they would come and kill us at any moment.
And they knew where all of our homes were,
'cause they were living with us.
- We were like, we have to get out of town.
We have to leave Denver.
The map was spread out, and there was these conversations
going back and forth about where we should go.
But nobody really had any real-world experience
of anywhere else.
I had heard about Oregon before,
and it sounded really cool to me.
So I was like, we should go to Oregon.
It seemed far enough away to be safe,
and nobody would expect it
because that's nowhere we'd ever lived before.
Pretty soon, the decision was made--we're going to Oregon.
- We had a huge caravan.
We all left in the middle of the night.
Our homes were completely intact.
We took a few clothes, a few things, and left.
♪♪ ♪♪
ANNA: Do you know that
after the 4 o'clock murders happened,
I had to start carrying a gun, too?
- I didn't know that.
ANNA: I was working in the appliance shop,
and I carried a gun to work.
I remember the feeling of the heaviness of it
in my pocket.
I remember driving back.
After Mark was killed, I had to go back into the shop.
And so they said, it hasn't been cleaned up yet.
CELIA: Oh! How many days after? - Like, the next day.
- Oh, no, really? ANNA: It was like--
[breathes deeply]
The carpet still had his blood on it.
[distant siren wailing]
♪♪ ♪♪
EMILY: The day of the funeral,
the emphasis was not on grieving their loss.
It was on survival.
It was a terrorizing event.
Fear had gripped everyone.
REPORTER: The victims were all members
of the Chynoweth family.
They'd been linked with several murders themselves,
but they'd left the LeBaron church to start a new life
away from the violence.
- Using the past example of the Rulon Allred funeral,
designed to lure Verlan to his death,
the authorities were really worried
that the same thing could happen
with the Chynoweth and the Marston funerals.
- There are some who aren't here,
who would like to be here.
They're concerned for their safety.
PERSON: Your brother Victor? - Yes.
PERSON: Your sister Rena? - Yes.
♪♪ ♪♪
- There was a perimeter created
around where we were going to bury our loved ones.
CELIA: They were protecting us from anybody else
that might want to take out more hits
during the gathering.
- There were snipers in the trees.
- There were friends of mine who didn't come to the funeral
and told me, I'm very sorry.
I can't go to your dad's funeral.
I'm afraid I'm going to be killed.
- There's an overarching sense of just terror.
The boogeyman is really big.
Anywhere, anytime, you don't really know what or why.
♪♪ ♪♪
Right after the funeral, literally within 24 hours,
we had to be packed and ready
and were whisked away by the FBI
into Witness Protection.
They changed our last name to DeVeaux,
and that we had to be very careful.
We couldn't tell anyone where we were.
- We couldn't hardly ever leave.
And our mother-- she had lost everything.
She had lost her whole community,
her support structure, her family.
She was spiraling into just a depressive state.
LISA: My dad was such a rock--
I mean, for her, for us...
EMILY: Mm-hmm. - For our community.
That...
loss was really incalculable. - Yeah.
- And I think it's something that...
you know, honestly, she just never recovered from.
♪♪ ♪♪
[camera shutter clicks]
DAVID: We have four murders.
These weren't random killings.
They were targeted assassinations.
Law enforcement had a pretty good idea
Heber and Aaron did this,
but they didn't have the necessary evidence
to prove it.
And then not long after the murders,
there was a development
that proved to be very important.
♪♪ ♪♪
LINDSAY: Police in Arizona get a tip
that this group of people
are staying in this dingy motel,
acting a little suspicious.
And when police arrive,
they find this group of clean-cut kids
driving stolen cars.
As police dig through the cars for evidence,
they find a copy of a newspaper
reporting on the 4 o'clock murders
the day after it had happened.
There's also a map of the Houston area.
Rena Street is circled right in the middle--
the street where Duane
and his eight-year-old daughter Jenny were murdered.
- There were a number of other things,
like what appeared to be disguises.
The stuff that was in these trucks
was pretty good circumstantial evidence
that these people had something to do
with what had gone on in Texas.
LINDSAY: The police arrested them on auto-theft charges.
And one of the men...
happens to be Heber LeBaron.
♪♪ ♪♪
REPORTER: Authorities say it wasn't until a week later
when a Phoenix investigator
called the Houston Police Department
that they realized who they had.
- Investigators began talking to one another
and put together some details that were similar,
both in Houston and in Phoenix.
And it was that type of information yesterday
that led our investigators
to believe that the people that we already had in custody
could, in fact, be involved in some cases in Houston.
- I've been a prosecuting attorney for over 40 years.
I was called to the office of the United States Attorney,
who had a case that they would like us to handle for them,
and this turned out to be the LeBaron case.
LINDSAY: So, as they start piecing together
this terrifying LeBaron puzzle,
they think that Heber is the leader
of the 4 o'clock assassinations.
But the problem is, they're having a very difficult time
putting together a case to try him
and other members of the KOG.
[distant siren wailing]
SCOTT: The big problem with the case was,
you have these murders
where they match up in almost every way.
It's like one killer had cloned himself or herself,
acted in three places at the exact same moment.
And in American law,
you have to know which one did which murder.
[dramatic music]
The police knew, the FBI knew who the three killers were.
They were very confident that the killers were Heber...
♪♪ ♪♪
Richard LeBaron...
and Doug Barlow.
What they couldn't do was match up
which of those three had done which murder.
And if you can't do that, you can't bring somebody to trial.
♪♪ ♪♪
TERRY: What did we have? We had nothing.
No one can put them there at the time,
no person to put them in Texas at the time,
no person to put them,
you know, acquiring these things, really.
And even then, if you could put them acquiring the things,
how could you relate the things to the actual event?
You couldn't.
- You can think you've got the right people,
but you still have to meet the standard.
You have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt
when you get to trial.
- But in Arizona,
officials aren't having a hard time at all
building a pretty solid auto-theft case.
[judge speaking indistinctly]
SCOTT: When they get busted on the auto-theft charges,
they make the decision to plead out,
to plead guilty to them.
My feeling is they do it
because you'll get a lesser sentence by pleading guilty,
rather than going to trial.
And then maybe you sort of fall off the radar down the road
on these murders you did.
So I think that for a lot of strategic reasons,
they thought, okay, let's just plead out.
♪♪ ♪♪
LINDSAY: You've got Heber LeBaron
and Doug Barlow sentenced to 10 years,
and Richard LeBaron is sentenced to 3 1/2 years,
because he's a minor.
But in 1988, it was pretty common for convicts
to serve half the time sentence or even less.
So they were still a threat.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Before Mark died,
I had already been accepted into a college.
I was so excited.
After Mark died
and the 4 o'clock murders happened,
there was a big discussion among the administration.
They thought that if the parents found out
who I was
that they would unenroll their children
if they didn't think they were safe.
They told me if I changed my name
and swear that I was not going to reveal who I was
to any of the students,
they would let me come.
It was a very weighty decision for me,
especially because I knew
how much Lillian depended on me.
But at the same time,
I felt like I had to move on with my life.
So I told Lillian that I had made the decision
that I wanted to go ahead and continue my education
and go to college.
And she was supportive of that.
♪♪ ♪♪
I mean, it was hard to leave the children behind--
you know, Emily and Lisa and the other kids--
because I was so close to them
and I was so involved in their lives.
But I felt like I was doing the right thing.
- During this time where my mother was really suffering,
her life as she had known it had collapsed.
And I think that as strong as my mother was, of course,
there was just an aloneness at that time
that just can't be overstated.
I remember that morning.
I got up and went to check on the laundry.
And my mom was standing in there.
She turned around, and she was crying.
And then I said, Mom, I just want to let you know,
we're going to be okay, that I really feel like, you know,
God's going to take care of us and we're going to be okay.
♪♪ ♪♪
And I hugged her.
I went back to bed.
And, I mean, it was really only minutes later,
I heard the sound
of what, you know, you know is a gunshot sound.
And then...
♪♪ ♪♪
I just--I knew she was gone.
[crying] I just remember thinking,
I can't believe our whole life is turned so upside down.
[sniffles]
ANNA: When Lillian took her own life...
I remember just being shocked.
It was like losing your mom.
- The tragedy of Lillian's suicide
is that she was just one
in a list of many former followers
who took their own lives.
Three years after testifying
against his own father in court...
Isaac LeBaron died by suicide as well.
♪♪ ♪♪
[telephone ringing]
DAVID: In this period after,
the murder case in Houston had cooled off some.
Leads had been exhausted.
All the people that could have been talked to were talked to,
but it really wasn't leading to anything specific.
LINDSAY: Police have Heber in jail for auto theft...
but he's essentially gotten away with murder.
Without a major break
or someone from the KOG coming forward,
the murders are in danger of never being solved.
- You don't prosecute a Mafia don
without somebody in the family turning
and giving evidence against the Mafia don.
It's the same thing with this family.
They may be even a tougher nut to crack
because they're related by blood
and they're related by this ideology
that has vengeance and violence at its core.
What law enforcement needed badly
was someone on the inside who could open the door.
[telephone ringing]
The Utah detective gets a phone call...
from Cynthia LeBaron,
who was down in Mexico.
Cynthia is a daughter of Ervil LeBaron.
Cynthia tells the detective
that some things have happened in Mexico,
that she and her sister were afraid for their lives,
that they would be willing to talk.
She wants us to meet her in Texas.
- This is a huge break for law enforcement
because she was part of the group in Phoenix.
They know she knows who did what in the 4 o'clock murders.
♪♪ ♪♪
So Cynthia comes across.
She's met by investigators at the U.S.-Mexican border.
♪♪ ♪♪
DAVID: Now, on the one hand,
we thought we're being set up for an ambush.
On the other hand, we thought, well, maybe they're serious.
We can't ignore this possibility.
We have to take advantage of it.
- That very same day, they cut a deal.
Anything she says in this interview...
will not be used against her.
So, once she gets that promise, she starts singing.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Cynthia and I were best friends as little girls.
- Cynthia and her siblings
lived with us in Ensenada.
Their mother would go to the U.S. to work,
and my mom helped raise those children at the time.
So we knew them very well.
- Cynthia admitted to her part
in the plot to kill the people in Texas.
♪♪ ♪♪
She admitted to keeping surveillance
on one of the victims.
TERRY: Cynthia was basically a lookout.
She called Heber and said, he's there now.
♪♪ ♪♪
DAVID: She knew all about the plan--she was part of it.
She described who was assigned to do what,
who was to kill Duane, who was to kill Mark,
who was to kill Ed.
- She not only names Heber and the other killers
in the 4 o'clock murders.
She gives investigators another piece of evidence, which is,
Aaron is in charge of the KOG.
♪♪ ♪♪
Heber is his hitman.
♪♪ ♪♪
And they had planned the 4 o'clock murders
for 2 years.
SCOTT: All along, law enforcement
has been thinking that Heber LeBaron
was the one mighty and strong-- he is the leader of the cult.
But in fact, it was Aaron LeBaron
who was the one mighty and strong.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Basically, we learned that Aaron is more like Ervil,
in the sense that Aaron
understands the religion really, really, really well
and is more hands off.
DAVID: They were told from the time they were born
that they were the anointed, that they were the exceptional,
that they were the people that were going to inherit
the Kingdom of God on Earth
if they did the things Ervil expected them to do.
- The information that Cynthia had
became extremely valuable in multiple cases,
including Dan Jordan's murder.
DAVID: Cynthia knew the plan for killing Dan Jordan.
She knew who was communicating to the people in Mexico
to get it done.
- Cynthia told them that the KOG purposely played
on Dan's sympathies to get in with the family.
This really was a long con.
While KOG members and Aaron are living with Dan Jordan,
Heber's hiding out in Mexico for months,
just waiting for the right time and the right moment
for Dan Jordan's murder.
They knew the hunting trip
would be a time that Dan would be isolated.
Aaron tells Heber when and where they would be.
Heber comes up from Mexico.
Now he's hiding in the woods,
lying in wait to kill Dan Jordan.
[gunshot]
Aaron orchestrated a near-perfect crime.
- Aaron was still out there on the run,
and the possibility of him coming to kill you
for one reason or another still existed.
But what we'd just been told by Cynthia
was a game changer.
It was what we needed to get a case prosecuted
in Texas,
and Cynthia was taken into the Witness Protection Program
almost immediately after she gave us this information.
- Even though Aaron remains a fugitive on the lam,
the Feds decide to go ahead and prosecute
the remaining suspects in custody.
♪♪ ♪♪
But until Aaron is behind bars...
the threat of violence
is always in the back of people's minds.
♪♪ ♪♪
[dramatic music]
♪♪ ♪♪
ANNA: For my birthday,
Mark and Lillian had purchased me a hope chest...
- Hope chest, yeah.
- Where I could begin planning
for my future life as a married woman.
And so, when I had a boyfriend for the very first time,
I strongly suspected
that he was going to ask me to marry him.
And, you know, of course, the answer was yes.
I was operating on probably less than a shoestring budget.
And Celia had a friend of our family
give me a beautiful dress.
- I got to be her bridesmaid.
♪♪ ♪♪
ANNA: I had looked forward
to Lillian helping me plan my wedding
and looked forward
to Mark giving me away on my wedding day.
CELIA: Mark and Lillian were very absent.
ANNA: And Mark and Lillian were very absent.
♪♪ ♪♪
We were trying to move on with our lives,
but things from our past
kept coming back and kept coming back.
- It was still in the back of our minds,
the KOG and the events and-- ANNA: Yeah.
- That, you know, there could be danger.
♪♪ ♪♪
REPORTER: The victims were one-time followers
who dared break away and were cut down
in what is known as a blood atonement.
This is how authorities view that atonement
in the indictment.
- Conspiracy to commit murder for hire,
interstate and foreign travel
for the purpose of murder for hire.
- Prosecutors believe that they'll be able,
with a conviction, to get a lengthy sentence
without any probability of parole.
- Even though they're in prison under auto-theft charges,
Heber and his associates,
Richard LeBaron and Doug Barlow,
get put on trial.
- As an assistant federal public defender,
I was assigned to represent Heber LeBaron,
the lead defendant in this case.
I did not expect him to be...
as college-kid-looking as he turned out to be...
nor, in the end, did I expect him to be
as candid as he was with me.
Heber truly believed...
what his father had told him and raised him to be.
He believed that they were obligated
to kill the people they were told to kill
in order to inherit
all the material and spiritual wealth
of the world.
♪♪ ♪♪
DAVID: During the trial,
Heber was as detached as anything else--
just detached, not part of this.
I'm above it all.
I'm not going to give this the dignity
of paying careful attention,
although I think they were listening very carefully
to everything that was being said...
particularly when Cynthia took the witness stand.
♪♪ ♪♪
- I had to deal with the devil,
and I'll stand by that deal.
But without her,
there would have been no prosecution, none.
DAVID: Cynthia laid things out just as she had laid them out
for us...
♪♪ ♪♪
Fearlessly, without looking or sounding intimidated,
nervous, or uncomfortable in any way...
although I'm sure she was all three.
♪♪ ♪♪
The trial lasted for four days.
♪♪ ♪♪
At the end of four days, it was given to the jury.
It was in the jury's hands.
- The outcome was in doubt, because it's a jury trial,
and we only had to win one juror's imagination
to hang it up.
- I felt if we did not get a conviction,
more people were going to die.
- After so much injustice that followed this family,
the verdict comes down,
and it's guilty for all three perpetrators.
Heber and Doug get life sentences
for the 4 o'clock murders.
- I think Heber has killed before,
and I think he enjoyed killing.
So, no, I don't think life's appropriate.
The death penalty is.
- As for Richard, he reaches a plea agreement
and serves five years.
- When I found out later about the verdict
and that they were going to be spending
a lot of time in prison,
I felt safer.
CELIA: It was better that they be in prison,
but there are a lot of mixed emotions.
- Yes.
- These are people that you love, that you care about.
It was heart-wrenching.
- I mean, anybody that was close to the story, I think,
felt a collective relief.
LISA: You know, Heber did send us a letter
that he wanted to take responsibility
and acknowledge for killing our father
and acknowledge the role
that he played in our mother's death.
♪♪ ♪♪
But I will never forget our mother,
in her deepest grief, prayed and forgave him
and told us, you have to forgive him
and, like, release him, that God will handle it.
We did not grow up with the burden of unforgiveness.
And it's the most tremendous gift
that our mother really could've ever given us,
as far as I'm concerned.
- Lisa and I have been through...
- A lot. - A lot of complex situations.
And, you know, here we are.
We still have a very close bond,
and I'm very grateful. - Mm-hmm.
There was just such profound fear for so long.
So I was like, I'm not going to let this run my life.
I'm not going to run away from death
and these gruesome things.
I'm going to...
make it my bitch.
- [chuckling]
- It's hard to decide
if justice is ever served when so much is lost,
but I think this was finally a step in the right direction.
But someone was still skirting justice.
REPORTER: Aaron LeBaron, now 24,
leader of the conspiracy, according to authorities,
still at large in Mexico,
Aaron having been designated
as the grand patriarch of this violent sect.
♪♪ ♪♪
- In 1995, we learned that Aaron's been taken
into custody in Mexico.
[dramatic music]
- We finally were able to convince Mexico
to arrest him and get him extradited.
- I didn't give orders,
neither am I leader of a cult like the newspapers say.
I'm a...
director of an English school.
I believe in...
giving to other people and helping other people.
♪♪ ♪♪
DAVID: I wouldn't look at him
and say, jeez, this guy is a master criminal.
But then I knew differently.
I knew that he'd had a lot more to do with all of this
than anybody really believed.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Ervil had indoctrinated these people for years.
We're, like, two generations in now.
When you've been indoctrinated your entire life
to believe that murder is a godly act,
that really complicates your morality.
TERRY: He was tried and convicted
because he was the intellectual author of the homicides.
He was the one that put it in motion.
And he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
♪♪ ♪♪
- I never met Ervil LeBaron in the flesh,
but I lived and worked
in the shadow of his ghost for years
and didn't stop
until after the conviction of Aaron in Texas.
- It's hard to get an exact count
in the wake of this 30-year crime spree,
but we do know that around 33 people were killed,
somewhere around 9 completed suicide,
and countless others suffered
at the hands of all of this violence.
- As long as that doggone book's out there,
The Book of the Covenant...
there's always a potential for someone to pick it up and say,
I'm the one mighty and strong now,
and that should be a concern to everyone.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Colonia LeBaron, where Ervil first started out,
still exists today.
The people living there
are trying to put the past behind them.
And then 2019 happens.
- Families mourning after a brutal massacre--
three mothers and six of their children killed.
- The LeBarons find themselves in the headlines again
for murder and death.
♪♪ ♪♪
Three cars are crossing the border
from Mexico into Texas when the cars are ambushed.
♪♪ ♪♪
And inside the cars are women,
mothers, and their children.
- At first, I thought to myself, oh, my God,
is the cult back?
Is this the new chapter?
Since then, it seems clear
that other factors have been at work.
REPORTER: Mexican officials believe they were caught
in the crosshairs of cartel violence,
saying that a criminal gang confused them
for a group aligned with the Sinaloa Cartel.
- It's just so sad, because these families living there
completely disavow Ervil's teachings.
And yet, it seems like
the sort of curse of LeBaron murderers isn't going away.
♪♪ ♪♪
[soft music playing on television]
♪♪ ♪♪
ADINE: Oh, my God.
CELIA: So they have to start with Los Molinos?
FAYE: This is Los Molinos. CELIA: Oh, God.
ADINE: Oh, my gosh.
- There was a made-for-TV movie that came out in the early '90s
called Prophet of Evil.
It was about our father, Ervil.
♪♪ ♪♪
CELIA: Oh, man. ANNA: This is horrible.
ADINE: That's terrible.
- Watching it now, it's just horrifying
how much violence there was
in our family history.
- Just heart-wrenching to see
because they're representing people that I love.
So it's hard to see what they've done with their lives.
- And the thing is that they were just brainwashed.
And when you take away that brainwashing,
we were always good people.
[somber music]
FAYE: The places that they're showing there
are way too nice. - I know.
[laughter]
- We did not live this nice, okay?
- Something was bumping me,
and I couldn't figure out what it was.
It's just this really nice house, well kept, maintained.
ANNA: And we weren't even allowed outside!
HYRUM: With white picket fence. [laughter]
- Through it all, I never really lost my faith.
I always had a relationship with God.
I have 10 children, 21 grandchildren,
and it just tickles my heart
to be with them and play with them.
And even though I went through all that crap,
I'm a very happy person, and I have a very happy life.
♪♪ ♪♪
- Oh, there's the Mexican jail where you were...
BOTH: Conceived! [laughter]
- I wanted to become a nurse,
but my life was set out for me by religious doctrine.
So I didn't think I was smart enough.
I didn't think that was possible.
But now as an adult, I became a nurse,
and I recently became a master gardener.
If that little girl could just see me now...
CHILDREN: Kill the police. Kill the police.
Kill the police.
- No way would that ever happen.
- We were taught to say... CELIA AND ANNA: I don't know!
I don't know!
[laughter]
- Currently, my beliefs about religion
is basically an atheist.
I think all religions are cults.
It's just some are better than others.
♪♪ ♪♪
I'm a Sergeant First Class in the U.S. Army.
I've deployed four times.
♪♪ ♪♪
I try to be beneficial to humanity and the planet.
- You were considered the military leader--
- Oh, that's Bryan Cranston right there.
CELIA: Oh, my God! Breaking Bad!
- Wait. Rewind, rewind!
ANNA: Who is he? CELIA: Breaking Bad!
HYRUM: He's only one of the most famous--
ADINE: The guy from Malcolm in the Middle!
Yes! Oh, my God.
HYRUM: I didn't know who he was the first time
I watched this 20 years ago. ANNA: What?
This is where he made his big debut.
- Debut.
- It's been over 40 years since I escaped my father's cult.
♪♪ ♪♪
I mean, it was a shock to me
when I learned that what we had experienced is called trauma.
To be able to grow and become the person that I am today,
to heal enough
that I was able to write my own story
and to publish my book...
I want to be an inspiration to others--
anyone who's experienced abuse, neglect, abandonment.
Those things don't have to define us today.
♪♪ ♪♪
I have overcome all of the odds,
and here I am.
So it's me and Hyrum that are in the movie so far.
- Yes. - We were in the Veracruz raid!
CELIA: Not specifically, but you were one of those kids.
Hyrum assisted by opening the door.
- Thanks, Hyrum.
- I ran away from the cult 36 years ago,
and I never turned back.
I have three grown children.
I have a career in finance.
And in my process, I had to evaluate
every belief that I had,
every thought, practically, that went through my mind
and look at it and say, do I really believe this?
Or is this what I was taught to believe?
♪♪ ♪♪
NARRATOR ON TV: Since Ervil LeBaron's death,
his children and members of his church
have committed 15 additional murders.
His legacy has continued.
- But no more! - Not anymore.
ANNA: No more. - No more.
ANNA: There's no telling this story
without bringing up this past.
♪♪ ♪♪
CELIA: I am ready now to embrace the wholeness
of who I am
and what it means today to be a LeBaron.
- Mm-hmm.
- It's something that I'm proud of.
- It's been over 30 years.
- Ervil's children are not about that anymore.
- Ervil's children are the ones who want all of that
to stop more than everyone. CELIA: Yeah.
- I promise you that.