Dennis and Cheryl Avery were a quiet couple who never had much money but were devoted to their three daughters and their church.
Unhappy with the ordination of women and other changes in the church, they followed lay minister Jeffrey Lundgren to Ohio and became allied with his breakaway fundamentalist cult. They apparently became so controlled by him they turned over their paychecks and bought a gun for him on their credit card.And it may have been that very gun that killed them and their daughters last spring, police say. Lundgren and other cult members are charged in their slayings.
"They were very sweet, very family-oriented people," said Norma Corkern, a librarian who made friends with the Averys more than 10 years ago in Independence. "Very loving. It just didn't make sense for them to be there."
The deaths left those who knew them struggling to understand what went wrong.
"I just think they didn't know what they were getting into when they went to Kirtland," said Marie Haworth, a friend from Independence.
Avery and his wife both grew up on the West Coast as members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a church that has roots in common with the Mormon Church but is separate. They were married in Independence, where the church is based, in 1970.
Avery, who worked 17 years as a computer programmer for a Kansas City bank, was a deacon in one of the RLDS congregations dotting the Independence area. Mrs. Avery taught preschool and Sunday school, sewed her family's clothes and took her bookworm daughters to summer reading programs at the public library.
The family lived in a small house in an older section of Independence. The daughters attended public schools until May 1986, then were schooled at home, church records show.
Mrs. Avery's mother, Donna Bailey of Centralia, Wash., said she telephoned and wrote her daughter often after the Averys moved to Ohio.
"I caught on early on that these were the wrong types of beliefs," Mrs. Bailey said in an interview published Friday in The Kansas City Times. "At one time she said, `People think we're a cult, but we're not.' That made me concerned."