The murder trial that ended in Texas this week toppled a Utah-based polygamist dynasty and explained the 1989 disappearance of six LeBaron children from Salt Lake City.
A Houston jury Wednesday returned guilty verdicts on federal civil rights and racketeering charges against two LeBaron youths and a friend for the 1989 murders of four people in the Houston area. A third LeBaron earlier pleaded guilty to similar charges.Investigators believe the trial shredded the remnants of Ervil LeBaron's murderous sect, The Church of The Lamb of God.
"There's no more LeBaron church. It's history," said Houston Police Sgt. John Burmester. Assistant U.S. Attorney David Schwen-di-man and prosecutor Mike Shelby agree LeBaron's church has sustained a death blow.
It wasn't the murder trial that shattered the deadly church. It was the decision by a generation of LeBaron children to come out of hiding and forsake a legacy of murder believed to be responsible for at least 19 deaths in the past 20 years.
The LeBarons - including the children who fled Salt Lake City in 1989 - have flocked to Houston in recent weeks. They were greeted by investigators who had come to know them well during several murder investigations and countless interrogations.
They were greeted by older siblings already cooperating with prosecutors over the 1989 murders.
And they were greeted by their big sister Rena Chynoweth. Chynoweth wrote an account of her years as one of Ervil LeBaron's wives in the book "The Blood Covenant." She published an account of the clan's violence - particularly her own murder of Rulon Allred - in an attempt to persuade siblings hiding in Mexico to leave the clan, Chynoweth said during an appearance on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show.
The book prompted a $53 million civil judgment against Chynoweth for Allred's murder, but it didn't lure her brothers and sisters out of Mexico.
The Oct. 31, 1991, murder of Natasha LeBaron, 21, did. When Natasha's sisters found out in May, 1992 that she had been murdered, they called Salt Lake City investigators and said they wanted out.
Chynoweth was in Houston these past weeks to welcome her brothers and sisters, give them a place to stay and help them start new lives, said Schwendiman.
Since Ervil LeBaron's death in 1981, the clan's story has been a story of children. Aaron LeBaron is believed to have used his younger siblings to stage the Oct. 16, 1987, shooting death of Daniel Ben Jordan, a clan renegade.
Investigators considered the youngsters critical witnesses to the Jordan murder investigation and placed them in area foster homes. The children - like all other LeBarons - refused to discuss the incident.
Two years later, the six youngsters, ranging in age from 11 to 18, disappeared. They vanished from their various foster homes Sept. 29, 1989.
Investigators called the disappearance a "prearranged conspiracy" to hustle the youngsters out of the range of the law.
The real reason was simpler and sadder.
"They didn't want to go," Burmester said. "But they had six really small brothers and sisters in Mexico with a seventh on the way and there was no one there to take care of them. They just made up their minds that they had to get back to the little kids."
The children simply went down to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Salt Lake City and bought tickets to Mexico, he said.
The story of children who killed and the children who were killed sears the minds of investigators who have lived with the horror of the LeBaron clan for several years.
"It works on your gut and it works on it real hard," Schwen-di-man said. "I've been carrying around these stories, these people and the vision of what these people have done in my head for years."
Burmester carries a more graphic vision: the sight of "Jennie."
Burmester was one of the four investigators called to the scene of the June 28, 1988, murder of Duane Chynoweth, 31 and his daughter, Jennifer, 8.
"We knew there would be a child there. But you can't imagine the kind of impression the sight of her made on us. You could tell immediately from the circumstances that she watched her father get killed and that's probably the last thing she saw before she died."
When Burmester saw Jennie, the setting sun struck her at such an angle that it gleamed through the holes in her head "as if she had a light bulb inside her head. That's something I'll never forget," he said.
The LeBaron children who carried out four simultaneous murders hundreds of miles apart that day hadn't counted on Jennie being there.
They had lured Duane Chynoweth to the vacant house with an anonymous call offering to sell him a dryer. He bought and sold used appliances.
"All his kids wanted to go along," Burmester said. But Duane Chynoweth only took Jennie, his youngest.
Jennie was murdered because Aaron LeBaron - the man who masterminded the murders - ordered his siblings to kill any witnesses over four years of age, Schwendiman said.
"When we first started meeting with the LeBaron kids after the killings, we hoped that what happened to Jennie would put an end to all of it," Burmester said. "We thought they would finally figure out this had gone too far."
Jennie's murder shook the LeBarons, but didn't sway them.
As investigators learned of the brutal lives the LeBaron children had lived, they understood the youths' brutality.
The children were physically, mentally and sexually abused by older LeBarons, Schwendiman said. The young girls were often raped and then given to their own relatives in marriage by the time they were 14.
The children of Hispanic wives were viciously beaten, he said. "Apparently, one of the LeBaron men was racist."
Jennie's death haunts Burmes-ter. So does the discovery that 17-year-old Richard LeBaron killed her so that he himself wouldn't be killed.
Tales of the beatings also tear at him, particularly the beating of a 6-year-old girl. "They were beaten for the most idiotic things, things that had no rhyme or reason. You wouldn't even believe it if I told you."
Many of the beatings were so vicious the older children who watched them have blocked them out, he said.
But the LeBaron children, all under 30, have fled that now. The part of the clan that Schwendiman calls the " `Lord of the Flies' generation" has come out of hiding.
"They aren't just pretty much out of church, they are totally out of it," Burmester said.
Aaron LeBaron and his sister Tarsa are still in hiding. They are wanted both in the United States and in Mexico.
The remaining clan wives and their children also have apparently fled, Burmester said. One wife appears to have fled with children ages 6, 7 and 8.
Another wife appears to have taken her children, ages 12, 11, 8 and 2, back to Guatemala, Bur-mes-ter said.
Without this new generation to carry on his beliefs, investigators believe Ervil LeBaron's legacy of hatred and violence is finally over.