A local FBI agent and a Salt Lake County attorney's office investigator left Illinois Friday after attempting to interview five members of the LeBaron polygamist clan in connection with a 1986 Sanpete County homicide.
Aaron LeBaron, Linda Johnson, Norma LeBaron, Patricia LeBaron and Andrea Monique LeBaron were taken into federal custody Feb. 14 in Chicago after immigration officials spotted them with several Hispanic children, who turned out to be Mexican nationals.But Utah law enforcement officers are interested in what the clan members, particularly Aaron LeBaron, might know about the Oct. 16, 1986, slaying of Daniel Ben Jordan, one of the late cult leader Ervil LeBaron's sons. Jordan was killed in a campground near Manti, where Jordan and his family were deer hunting.
Jordan was a lieutenant in Ervil LeBaron's Church of the Lamb of God before he defected.
Aaron LeBaron was at the deer hunting party, and Linda Johnson, one of Ervil LeBaron's 12 wives, was also believed to have been there. Her name is on a federal witness warrant out of Salt Lake City. Andrea Monique LeBaron, Norma LeBaron and Patricia LeBaron are daughters of Ervil.
Cal Clegg, spokesman for the FBI's Salt Lake office, said it's too early for his office to be releasing any information about the latest developments.
In addition to the five in Chicago, a sixth member of the LeBaron clan, Natasha Thelma LeBaron, one of Ervil LeBaron's daughters, was being questioned in a Gwinnett County, Ga., jail following her arrest on a charge of having false identification. Her name also appears on a federal witness warrant in connection with the Jordan slaying. The Utah investigators were en route to Georgia Friday morning.
Police in Houston have also questioned Aaron LeBaron and the others about the June 27, 1988, shooting deaths of Mark Chynoweth, 36, his brother, Duane Chynoweth, 31, and Duane's daughter, Jennifer, 8.
And Irving, Texas, police want to question the LeBaron clan members about the death of Eddie Marston, 32, who was gunned down in that city about the same time that the Chynoweths were killed.
The Chynoweths and Marston were former followers of Ervil LeBaron.
Also suspected in the Texas and Utah slayings is another Ervil LeBaron son, Heber, who along with Tarsa LeBaron, Cynthia LeBaron, Richard LeBaron and DouglasLee Barlow, faces an April 18 trial in Phoenix on 28 charges related to an alleged truck-theft ring.
Ervil LeBaron, who was convicted in the 1977 murder of rival polygamist Rulon Allred in Murray, died of a heart attack in Utah State Prison in 1981.
Several experts on the LeBaron clan speculate that Ervil's sons are carrying out a hit list their father allegedly wrote just prior to his death.