They believed it was a house of faith. Others called it madness. >> He claimed that he had visions and he would time travel. >> Did you believe Jeff was a prophet? >> At one time I did. >> 35 years ago, Jeff Lundgren led a cult and killed a family of five. Those on the inside reveal [music] what life was really like.

>> I began to view everything in life differently. Dad had to be right all the time. And even if you if you could prove that he was wrong. >> October 24th, 2006. Lucasville, Ohio. The sun had barely come up when the warden walked the 17 steps from the holding cell to the execution chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility to confirm that everything was ready.

 Inside that cell, Jeffrey Don Lundgren was awake. He had spent the previous night making phone calls, crying on the phone with his wife, eating his last meal of turkey, potatoes, and gravy, salad, and pumpkin pie. He had been so certain the courts would grant him another delay that he had napped through most of the morning. They did not.

At 10:00 a.m., the guards came for him. He walked those 17 steps without his Bible. The book he had used for decades to bend people to his will, to justify murder, to convince grown men and women that he spoke directly to God, he left it behind in the cell. On the other side of the glass, witnesses were already seated.

Among them were the brothers of a woman Jeffrey had killed 17 years earlier. They had waited a long time for this morning. In this video, we will talk about the crimes that put Jeffrey Lundgren in that chamber, his last meal, and his last words. If you are new here, welcome to True Crime Matter.

 Hit subscribe, we put out new videos every week. To know why the state had to kill the condemned, we have to go back. Jeffrey Don Lundgren was born on May 3rd, 1950 in Independence, Missouri. Independence was a significant city in the world of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the RLDS Church, a splinter denomination that had broken from mainstream Mormonism in the 19th century.

Jeffrey’s family were devoted members. Church was not optional, scripture was not optional, and Jeffrey’s father, Don Lundgren, was not a man who offered a lot of options. By multiple accounts, Jeffrey’s childhood was marked by severe physical abuse at the hands of his father.

 Neighbors later confirmed they had witnessed the beatings. His mother, Lois, never stepped in, never defended her son. By the time Jeffrey reached middle school, he had retreated entirely into himself. He was a loner. He had almost no friends. He was socially awkward and deeply resentful, though he would not have called it resentment. He would have called it knowing that he was different from everyone around him.

There was one place Jeffrey did not feel like an outsider. Church. In a world where he struggled to connect with people, Jeffrey connected with scripture. He had a gift for memorization. He could recite long Bible passages from memory in a way that made other children look at him with something close to awe. That was the first time Jeffrey Lundgren understood that the Bible could give him power over people.

The other thing that gave him power was guns. As he got older, Jeffrey and his father spent time together on hunting trips. The abuse had not stopped, but the gun range was neutral ground. Jeffrey became a skilled marksman, learning how to handle firearms with precision. He became comfortable with the idea of aiming at something living and pulling the trigger.

He enrolled at Central Missouri State University. And it was there at an RLDS youth house on campus that he met Alice Keeler. Alice had her own wounds. Her father had also been abusive. Two people carrying the same damage found each other and that bond was immediate and intense. They became lovers. Alice got pregnant.

 They dropped out of college and married in the spring of 1970. Jeffrey’s parents refused to attend the wedding. Jeffrey enlisted in the United States Navy that same year. He served as an electronics technician from 1970 to 1974, received an honorable discharge and settled with Alice and their growing family in San Diego, California.

 They would eventually have four children together. But the life Jeffrey tried to build kept collapsing under him. He couldn’t hold a job. He stole from employers repeatedly. He lied constantly. Money was always a crisis. According to hospital records, he became violent toward Alice. She was hospitalized with a ruptured spleen, an injury doctors believed was consistent with being shoved forcefully into a closet door handle.

Economic pressure eventually forced the family to move back to Missouri. And by the early 1980s, Jeffrey’s relationship with the RLDS Church had curdled into contempt. The church was becoming more progressive. They were allowing women to be ordained as ministers. Jeffrey despised this. He saw it as a corruption of true scripture, a betrayal of God’s design.

He began holding his own Bible study sessions, teaching his own interpretations, gathering his own small audience of believers who found his knowledge of scripture electrifying. By 1984, Jeffrey claimed he had received a direct message from God. He was told to move to Kirtland, Ohio. This was not an arbitrary location.

Kirtland was one of the most sacred sites in the RLDS tradition. It was where Joseph Smith himself had built the first Mormon temple in the 1830s. For Jeffrey, the message felt like confirmation. He wasn’t just a man who knew the Bible well. He was someone being moved by God toward a specific destination for a specific purpose.

The RLDS Church gave him an unpaid position as a senior temple guide, along with free housing adjacent to the temple. Jeffrey accepted. It was the perfect platform. Tourists and church members would pass through the Kirtland temple, and Jeffrey was the man who explained it to them. He was charming. He was knowledgeable.

He had an IQ of 124, and he knew exactly how to hold a room. But, the public tour guide was a front. What Jeffrey was actually doing was teaching private classes. He had developed what he called a chiastic interpretation of scripture, a method of reading the Bible that looked for mirror patterns and recurring structures in the text.

 He claimed he had invented this approach himself. He had not. Chiasmus had been a recognized literary device for centuries, but his followers didn’t know that. To them, Jeffrey Lundgren had unlocked a layer of scripture no other teacher had ever found. He seemed to see things in the Bible that no one else could see. He spoke with the certainty of someone who had been granted access to truth that was simply unavailable to ordinary people.

That certainty was magnetic. People were drawn to him. Some of them had been looking for exactly this, a leader who didn’t ask questions, who provided answers. A man who told them their confusion was not their fault, that the traditional church had failed them, that he alone could show them the way. Families began gathering around Jeffrey.

Some of them left their lives behind to follow him. And Jeffrey, recognizing what was happening, began to tighten his grip. He forbade his followers from talking to each other without his permission. Private conversations, he told them, were a form of murmuring, a sin referenced in scripture. If you spoke behind his back, you were sinning against God.

 He would walk the halls and eavesdrop on whatever conversations he could find, then confront followers later with details of what they had said. Over time, people began to believe he could actually read their minds. That was not an accident. That was a technique. He demanded money. All of it. Every paycheck, every savings account, every dollar the families in his group possessed was to be contributed to the group.

He controlled the finances entirely. He determined what each family received back and what they did not. He selected women from within the group to become his plural wives, telling them and their husbands that this was God’s will, that it was written in scripture, that refusal was a form of spiritual failure.

He made women perform ritual cleansing ceremonies naked in the wilderness. He intimidated anyone who asked too many questions. He created an environment where absolute obedience to Jeffrey Lundgren was indistinguishable from absolute obedience to God. By 1987, the RLDS Church had seen enough. Church officials believed Jeffrey had stolen approximately $40,000 in donations that had been entrusted to him for the temple.

He was dismissed as a lay minister and evicted from his church-provided housing. It didn’t break his movement. If anything, it hardened it. Jeffrey told his followers that the church had turned its back on true scripture, that they were being persecuted for their faith, that leaving was the right thing. Approximately 20 people packed up and moved with him to a rented farmhouse at 8671 Chardon Road in rural Kirtland.

Among those 20 people were Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their three daughters. Dennis Avery was 49 years old, a quiet, hard-working man from Independence, Missouri, deeply devoted to his faith. He had first encountered Jeffrey’s scripture classes back in Missouri in 1986. And he had been captivated.

 When Jeffrey announced the move to Kirtland, Dennis didn’t hesitate. In April 1987, he sold the family home in Missouri and relocated his entire family to Ohio. He turned over the proceeds from the sale to Jeffrey. Tens of thousands of dollars. Gone. Cheryl Lynn Bailey Avery was 46 years old.

 She had been born in Washington state and had trained as a school teacher before becoming a full-time wife and mother. She was devoted to her daughters, devoted to her husband, devoted to her faith. The three girls she and Dennis had raised were Trina Denise, born in 1974 and 15 years old that spring. Rebecca Lynn, born in 1976 and 13. And Karen Diane, born in August 1982.

Karen was seven. The Avery family was exactly the kind of family Jeffrey Lundgren claimed to be building his community around. Faithful, sacrificial, willing. But almost from the beginning, Jeffrey despised them. He found Dennis Avery weak, too soft, not forceful enough in his obedience. He would refer to Dennis privately as a a excuse for a man.

He found Cheryl too controlling, too present, too much of an influence over Dennis. And the Averys had committed specific offenses that Jeffrey could not forgive. They were the only cult members who did not live inside the farmhouse, maintaining their own separate residence nearby. Jeffrey considered this an act of disloyalty, and Dennis had quietly kept a small bank account set aside for the family’s private use, rather than surrendering every cent.

In Jeffrey’s world, that was a sin. He began calling what he was planning to do to the Avery family pruning the vineyard. The phrase came from scripture. A gardener who wants a vine to grow removes the branches that are holding it back. Jeffrey Lundgren had decided that the Avery family was the branch. In 1988, his teachings took on a new and more dangerous shape.

He began preaching about the second coming of Christ. He told his followers it was going to happen on May 3rd, his own birthday. It was going to take place at the Kirtland Temple, and it was going to require them to seize the temple by force, to kill anyone who stood in their way. He had his followers digging tunnels on the property.

He was stockpiling weapons. He was conducting something that looked, from the outside, like paramilitary training. A neighbor noticed. In April 1988, she reported her suspicions to Kirtland police officer Ron Andolsek. A former cult member came forward shortly after and told authorities about the planned temple assault.

The FBI opened a domestic terrorism investigation. When the Kirtland police chief confronted Jeffrey directly, Jeffrey called off the temple plan and told his followers he had received a new message from a higher power. But the investigation didn’t stop watching, and Jeffrey knew it. So, he adjusted the prophecy.

The second coming wasn’t canceled, it was delayed. And the reason it was delayed, Jeffrey told his followers, was that the group was not spiritually clean. There was impurity among them. And impurity, he said, had to be removed before God would move. He had already decided who the impurity was. On April 10th, 1989, Jeffrey ordered several of his male followers to dig a pit in the barn behind the farmhouse.

6 ft wide, 7 ft long, 4 ft deep. When they asked what it was for, he told them it was for storage. No one questioned this. Questioning Jeffrey Lundgren was not something his followers did. Over the following days, he set the rest of the plan in motion. He instructed Cheryl Avery to write a letter to her family back in Missouri.

The letter said the Averys had found jobs in Wyoming and were relocating. They would send a contact address once they were settled. Cheryl wrote it. She trusted him completely. She had no idea she was writing the document that would ensure no one came looking for her body. On April 17th, Jeffrey moved all of the Avery family’s belongings out of their residence and into the farmhouse.

He rented them a motel room and told them they would be staying there before the group’s upcoming wilderness trip. That evening, he hosted a farewell dinner at the farmhouse. The entire group gathered. They ate together. They prayed. The Avery family sat at that table surrounded by people they called their community, their brothers and sisters in faith, and they felt nothing but gratitude for the life they had built in Kirtland.

They ate their last meal without knowing it was their last meal. After dinner, Jeffrey He all of the men, except Dennis Avery into his bedroom. He reached into his holster, drew his gun, held it up, and looked around the room. Are you with me? Every man said yes. That included his 19-year-old son, Damon, Ronald Luff, Daniel Kraft, Richard Brandt, Greg Winship.

 Jeffrey laid out the plan. They would lure the Avery family members out to the barn one at a time. They would bind them. They would shoot them. They would bury them in the pit. The chainsaw had already been set up inside the barn. It would be left running to muffle the sound of the gunshots. The murder weapon was a .

45 caliber semi-automatic handgun. Inside the farmhouse, the women were cleaning up after dinner, washing dishes, wiping down surfaces. Some of them knew. Two of them, Susan Luff and Deborah Olivares, stood in the kitchen and said quietly to each other, “Do you think it’s happening?” They heard the chainsaw running in the barn, and they kept washing the dishes.

Ronald Luff went back into the house and told Dennis Avery that he was needed in the barn to help move some camping equipment. Dennis Avery, trusting and completely unsuspecting, put down whatever he was doing and followed Luff outside. When Dennis entered the barn, the men were waiting. They tried to use a stun gun on him.

It malfunctioned. The men tackled him to the ground, all of them together. They bound his hands behind his back. They bound his feet. They wrapped duct tape across his mouth. Dennis fought. He was not a passive man in that moment. He struggled hard, but there were too many of them, and it was too late. They carried him to the pit and forced him down into the dirt.

Dennis Avery got to his knees at the bottom of that pit and looked up at the man he had sold his house to follow, the man he had given his life savings to, the man his daughters called a prophet of God, and he screamed through the tape. The words were muffled, but the men above him understood them. No. This isn’t necessary. God damn it.

God damn it. God damn it. Jeffrey Lundgren raised the .45 caliber handgun and shot Dennis Avery twice in the back. Dennis’s body fell forward into the dirt of the pit. Jeffrey made every man in that barn look at the body. He wanted them all to see it. He wanted them to understand that there was no going back now, that every single one of them was now bound to this night.

Damon Lundgren, Jeffrey’s 19-year-old son, stood among those men and fell apart. He began crying hysterically. He told his father he could not do this. He refused to continue. Jeffrey looked at his son and told him to go outside and serve as a lookout. That was the only mercy Jeffrey Lundgren offered that night.

Ronald Laff went back into the house and told Cheryl Avery that her husband needed her help out in the barn. Cheryl followed him outside. When she reached the barn, the men grabbed her. They gagged her mouth. They wrapped duct tape over her eyes. She never saw the pit. She never saw her husband’s body 3 ft below where she was standing.

 She never had any idea what was waiting for her. Jeffrey Lundgren shot Cheryl Avery three times, twice in the chest, once in the abdomen. They placed her body in the pit beside her husband. Then they went back for the daughters. Trina was 15. She was brought to the barn and the men did to her what they had done to her parents.

They bound her hands and feet. They wrapped tape around her head. Ron Laff and Richard Brand carried her to the pit and lowered her in beside her parents. The chainsaw was running. Jeffrey stood over her, pointed the gun at her head, and fired. The first bullet struck her skull and ricocheted off.

 Even with her mouth taped shut, Tina cried out. The men heard it. Jeffrey fired again. The second shot killed her. Rebecca was 13. She was shot twice, once in the thigh, once in the back. She was placed in the pit still living, bleeding out in the dirt, in the dark, surrounded by her mother and her father and her sister. The last to die was Karen.

Karen Avery was 7 years old. Ronald Luff went inside the house and took her by the hand and told her they were going to see some horses in the barn. Karen was small enough that Luff offered to give her a piggyback ride. She accepted. She climbed onto his back and let him carry her out into the April night, through the farmhouse yard, and through the barn door, and into the place where her family was waiting for her in a pit in the ground.

They set her down. They wrapped duct tape around her small hands, her small feet, her small face. She was visibly frightened. The men could see it. She was shaking. She did not understand what was happening to her. Jeffrey Lundgren stood at the edge of the pit and pointed his gun down at Karen Avery’s head and pulled the trigger twice.

 Five members of the Avery family were dead. A husband, a wife, a 15-year-old, a 13-year-old, a 7-year-old who had been told she was going to see horses. Jeffrey’s men covered the bodies with lime and soil and rocks and garbage and sealed the pit. They went back inside. Inside the farmhouse, the dishes were done. The next morning, April 18th, 1989, Kirtland police officers and FBI agents arrived at the farmhouse.

 They were following up on the earlier complaints about cult activity and improper firearms use. They searched the property. They walked through the barn. Their boots passed directly over the place where five bodies were buried less than a foot below the surface. They spoke to the followers. They asked if anyone was being held against their will.

Everyone said no. The authorities left. Jeffrey Lundgren looked at what had just happened and understood that the police had been closer than he could afford. Within hours of the investigators leaving, he ordered everyone to pack whatever they could carry and move out. The entire group fled, first to a campsite in West Virginia, then drifting further from state to state, living off the grid, moving as Jeffrey directed.

The five bodies of the Avery family remained in that barn in Kirtland, sealed in the dark, decomposing through spring, through summer, through fall. Back in Missouri, Cheryl’s family received her letter. The Averys had gotten jobs in Wyoming. They would send an address when they were settled. No one worried. No one went looking.

Eight months passed. The break came from inside the cult. Larry Keith Johnson had been a loyal follower, but Jeffrey Lundgren had selected Johnson’s wife, Katherine, to become one of his plural wives. That was the thing that finally broke him. On December 31st, 1989, Johnson contacted ATF agents in Kansas City, Missouri.

He told them everything. He drew a map, marking the exact spot in the barn at 8671 Chardon Road, where the bodies were buried. On January 3rd, 1990, Kirtland Police Chief Dennis Yarbrough obtained a search warrant. Law enforcement from multiple agencies converged on the property. They began digging.

 Assistant Prosecutor Karen Cole was there. She said later that as the hours passed she kept hoping the informant had been wrong. That they would dig and dig and find nothing. We waited hours and we dug in that barn and we hoped he was wrong and we prayed he was wrong and he wasn’t wrong. On January 9th, all five bodies were recovered. Each one bound with duct tape.

 Each one shot with a 45 caliber handgun. Dennis Avery 49, Cheryl Avery 46, Trina Avery 15, Rebecca Avery 13, Karen Avery 7. An entire family murdered by a man who claimed to speak for God, buried in a barn, undiscovered for eight months while their killer moved freely across the country. Three days later on January 7th, Jeffrey Lundgren, his wife Alice and his son Damon were arrested at a motel near the California-Mexico border.

 Jeffrey had been preparing to cross into Mexico. He was days away from disappearing. The timing of the arrest was that close. 13 cult members were ultimately charged in connection with the murders. Jeffrey’s trial began on August 13th, 1990 in Lake County Common Pleas Court. The evidence was staggering. Eyewitness testimony from the men who had been in that barn, forensic evidence, the letter Cheryl Avery had been made to write, and Jeffrey’s own words delivered in an unsworn statement directly to the jury in a bid to avoid the death penalty.

He stood before the 12 people who held his fate and told them this, “It’s not a figment of my imagination that I can in fact talk to God, that I can hear his voice. I am a prophet of God. I am even more than a prophet.” And then, asked whether he regretted what he had done to the Avery family, he said this, “I cannot say that God was wrong.

I cannot say that I am sorry I did what God commanded me to do in the physical act.” He killed five people, including a 7-year-old girl, and he stood in open court and told a jury he was not sorry. On August 29th, 1990, the jury found Jeffrey Lundgren guilty on five counts of aggravated murder and five counts of kidnapping.

On September 20th, after deliberating for just 2 hours, the jury recommended death. Jeffrey Lundgren was sentenced to die. Alice Lundgren was convicted of conspiracy, complicity, and kidnapping. She was sentenced to 150 years to life. Under the terms of her sentence, she will not be eligible for parole until the year 2092.

She was not in the barn that night. She was in the house and the jury still put her away for the rest of her natural life and then some. Damon Lundgren, who had been 19 years old and had broken down after watching his father shoot Dennis Avery, was convicted on four counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to 120 years to life.

The jury acquitted him of Cheryl Avery’s murder, accepting the argument that he had been too distraught to participate after what he witnessed. He still received 120 years. Ronald Luff, who had been the one to lure each Avery family member out to their death, received 170 years to life. Daniel Kraft received 50 years to life.

Richard Brand and Greg Winship each received 15 years to life and were eventually paroled in 2010. Several other members of the cult received sentences ranging from 7 to 25 years. Jeffrey Lundgren spent the next 17 years on death row at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown. He filed appeal after appeal.

 Every single one was denied. He claimed the murders had been a misinterpretation of scripture. He claimed he had genuinely believed he was following a divine command. His attorney said he had changed, that he showed remorse. Prosecutors who had spent years on this case said otherwise. They said Jeffrey Lundgren, even after 17 years, still believed he had done the right thing.

That the remorse was performance. That the man who stood in that barn in 1989 was the same man sitting on death row in 2006. In September of 2006, Jeffrey appeared before the Ohio Parole Board for a clemency hearing. A board member named Kathleen Kovach interviewed him for 1 hour and 40 minutes. He talked about his abusive childhood.

He talked about how his father had taught him that love and judgment were the same thing. He was articulate. He was composed. The board deliberated and unanimously denied clemency. His attorneys made one final attempt. They filed a lawsuit arguing that Ohio’s lethal injection protocol constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

 They pointed to Jeffrey’s obesity, 275 lb, and his diabetes, arguing that these conditions made him more susceptible to pain during the procedure. On October 17th, a federal judge granted a temporary stay of execution. Jeffrey, apparently confident the delay would hold, spent the morning of October 23rd napping in his cell. Late that night, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way.

The United States Supreme Court declined to intervene. Governor Bob Taft denied clemency. Jeffrey Lundgren would die in the morning. At 10:49 on the night of October 23rd, the warden called Jeffrey and told him the stay had been lifted. At 10:50, Jeffrey called Alice. No answer. He tried her cell 2 minutes later and got through.

 They spoke for several minutes. At 11:04, his attorney called. At 11:05, he called Alice again. On the morning of October 24th, medical staff administered his blood pressure medication and his insulin. The same conditions he had tried to weaponize to stop his execution were now just the morning routine of a dying man. At 8:23 a.m.

, while on the phone with Alice, Jeffrey Lundgren began to cry. The prison time log recorded the moment with clinical precision. With 2 hours and 28 minutes remaining in his life, the 6-foot-1, 275-pound prophet of God, who had shot five people in a barn and told a jury he was not sorry, broke down and wept on the phone with his wife.

 His last call with Alice ended 1 hour and 11 minutes before he was pronounced dead. His final meal was turkey, potatoes and gravy, a salad, and pumpkin pie. He was also offered coffee, juice, milk, Rice Krispies, three pancakes, and three servings of syrup. He declined the coffee. He declined the syrup. At 10:00 a.m.

, he was escorted from his holding cell. There were 17 steps between the holding cell and the execution chamber. He walked them slowly. He did not have his Bible with him. The book he had spent decades using to control people, to justify murder, to bend two dozen human beings to his will, he left it behind in the cell. Among the witnesses on the other side of the glass were Cheryl Avery’s brothers, Donald Bailey and Kent Kilby.

They had waited 17 years for this moment. Donald Bailey stood at the window as Jeffrey was brought in. He wanted Jeffrey to see his face. He wanted the man who had killed his sister and his three nieces to know that someone from that family was there watching him die. Also among the witnesses was Steven Ladaret, the prosecutor who had secured the conviction, who had been present when the Avery family’s bodies were lifted from that pit in 1990.

He had seen what the barn held. He had never been able to forget it. No one was there for Jeffrey. Not one family member. Not one friend. No one claimed a seat to bear witness to the end of his life. The man who had called himself a prophet, who had made followers call him dad, who had collected human beings the way other men collect authority, died without a single person in that room who loved him.

At 10:17 a.m., the warden asked if he had any final words. Jeffrey turned his head slightly and spoke. For my last words, I’d like to profess my love for God, my family, my children, and my beloved wife. I am because you are. 15 seconds. That was all he had. And in those 15 seconds, he professed love for God, for his family, for his children, for his wife.

 He did not say the name Dennis Avery. He did not say Cheryl. He did not say Trina or Rebecca or Karen. He did not say he was sorry. He did not acknowledge that five people were dead because of him. The only names that crossed his lips at the end of his life were his own people, his own blood, his God, himself. At 10:17 a.m., the warden gave the signal.

Two syringes of thiopental sodium were administered at 10:17 and 10:18, a sedative designed to render Jeffrey unconscious. At 10:19, a saline flush cleared the IV lines. At 10:21, pancuronium bromide was injected, the paralytic that stops a person from breathing. Another flush at 10:22. At 10:23, the final syringe, potassium chloride, the drug that stops the heart.

Jeffrey Lundgren did not move. His massive body lay still on the gurney. His breathing slowed. His chest stopped rising. His heart stopped beating. At 10:26 a.m., the injection process was complete. At 10:27 a.m., Jeffrey Don Lundgren was pronounced dead. The warden made the announcement. The curtain was closed.

 Afterward, Steven Lattaret spoke to reporters outside. He said he did not take any pleasure in what he had just seen. “I can’t get the scene of the murder out of my mind,” he said. “I had hoped there would be no children as the bodies were being unburied.” Those of us who were in the barn remembered it was the parents first, then the children.

Donald Bailey, Cheryl’s brother, said it brought him peace. He had stood at that window and watched Jeffrey die, and he felt something finally release. The farmhouse at 8671 Chardon Road became one of those places that a community never quite recovers from. A man named Jeff Howell moved into the property years after the murders and told reporters that when he first heard about what had happened there, he went down to the barn and lay in the pit himself in the exact spot where the Averys had been buried. He said he did

it to prove to himself he was not afraid. A church called New Promise Church eventually purchased the land for $350,000. In November of 2007, just over a year after Jeffrey’s execution, the barn was demolished. A new building stands on that ground now. The pit is gone. The grave is gone. But five people were murdered there, and that doesn’t go away because you tear down the walls.

 Sajena Romandalsek, who had led the original investigation, compared Jeffrey Lundgren to Jim Jones, who orchestrated the Jonestown Massacre in 1978, to David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidians and died in the Waco siege in 1993, to Charles Manson. He said the methods were identical. The isolation, the financial control, the manufactured belief that the leader was the only pathway to God.

 Jeffrey Lundgren didn’t invent any of it. He just applied it in a rented farmhouse in rural Ohio and then used it to justify killing a family of five in a barn. Here is the thing that stays with me about this case. Dennis Avery screamed through that duct tape. With his hands bound behind him and his feet tied together and his mouth sealed, he still managed to make himself understood. This isn’t necessary.

Those were his words. Not a threat, not a curse, just a man trying to reason with someone who had already decided. And Jeffrey Lundgren shot him twice in the back. Karen Avery was carried to her death on a man’s back thinking she was going to see horses. She was 7 years old.

 She was scared when the tape went over her eyes. The men around her could see that she was scared. And they stood there and let it happen. Cheryl Avery wrote a letter to her family in Missouri that kept anyone from looking for her body for 8 months. She wrote it because she trusted Jeffrey Lundgren completely. She believed he was a prophet. She believed he was leading her family towards something sacred.

She walked out to that barn because a man she trusted told her husband needed her. That is what trust looks like when it is weaponized. That is what a cult does to a person. Jeffrey Lundgren spent 17 years on death row claiming he had received a command from God. He told the parole board about his abusive childhood, about the father who beat him, about the theology he had constructed around pain and judgment.

None of it was enough. The board said no. The court said no. The governor said no. And on an October morning in 2006, the state of Ohio said no one more time, for good. He left his Bible in the cell. He walked 17 steps to the chamber. He said he loved God and his wife and his children, and then he died without apologizing for any of it.

The question I want to leave you with today is this. Dennis and Cheryl Avery moved their entire family from Missouri to Ohio to follow this man. They sold their house. They gave him their money. They believed, genuinely believed, that Jeffrey Lundgren was connected to God in a way that ordinary people were not.

And they were not foolish people. They were not weak-minded people. They were devoted, faithful, sincere human beings who were looking for something real. So what does it take for a person to look at someone like Jeffrey Lundgren and see a prophet instead of a predator? And what does it say about all of us that the answer is sometimes nothing more than the right words delivered with enough certainty? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Do you believe Jeffrey Lundgren genuinely thought he was following God’s commands? Or was this always about power, and religion was just the tool he used to take it? I want to hear where you land on that. Thank you for watching True Crime Matter. If you are not subscribed yet, now is the time, and I will see you in the next one.