With the three Lundgrens now under arrest there were just two more suspects at large. Danny Kraft and Kathy Johnson were found five days later on a San Diego motorway travelling south in Danny’s pick-up truck. There was no chase, no fight, they knew it was now over.
IN THE COURT ROOM
The following months saw trial after trial as one by one the 13 religiously devout men and women stood up and took their oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help them God.
By January 1991 they had all been sentenced. Sentences ranged from 18 months probation for obstruction of justice for Tonya and Dennis Patrick to five death sentences for Jeffrey Lundgren. Damon Lundgren was found guilty of four out of the five murders but his life was saved from death row after the jury heard statements from his friends and family, instead he was given 20 years to life for each of the four murders.
Alice Lundgren was sentenced to ten to 20 years for five accounts of kidnapping and 20 years for complicity to commit murder on five counts, with all sentences having to be served consecutively.
So, how could it have come to this, 12 people all with compassionate hearts ended up being part of killing five innocent people, including three little girls. How could 12 people who would have at one time never let such a thing happen, be twisted into believing that it was a call of God – an event that had to take place? Jeffrey Lundgren had scared them or brainwashed them into a new way of thinking and by the time the murders took place there was no free-thinking left, anything view or thought that came into those 12 people’s heads had passed through Jeffrey Lundgren’s mind first where it had taken on a different form.
And what about Jeffrey Don Lundgren? In a five-hour long statement, which he issued during his penalty phase, Lundgren declared that he: ‘considered [himself] a prophet and through interpretation of the scriptures, God had told him that the Avery family were to be killed’. To this day whilst on death row Jeffrey Don Lundgren is still writing letters to anybody willing to read them stating his reasoning behind the murders and giving biblical proof for his actions.
TRYING TO UNDERSTAND
Ten years after the murders, in April 1999, some of Lundgren’s flock opened up to the Cleveland Plain Dealer – Ohio’s largest newspaper – and reported that they actually felt freer in prison than the whole time they had spent under Lundgren’s grasp. One woman in paticular feels this a lot, and that is Susan Luff. She believes that she was deceived by both Lundgren and her husband Ron, who was the leader’s right-hand man. Susan Luff insists to this day that she did not understand what was going on due to being so mentally brainwashed by her life in the cult. Now, in prison, she is once a again a free-thinker with no worries of death threats or abuse. She can also contact her friends and family whenever she likes, can study new subjects and can pray when she wants to, not when dictated to. In the Plain Dealer article on April 11, 1999, she was quoted as saying:
You see, there are no guns here, no death threats, and no one can even be verbally abusive here . . . I do not want to just be a survivor, I’m doing everything I can here to give back to society.
So how can these ‘survivors’ keep their faith after such a traumatic experience at the hands of religion? Why did God not strike Lundgren down when he saw what sins were taking place?
Ron Luff believes that he has to start his religion from the beginning again and re-learn everything he thought he already knew:
God had become so ugly I couldn’t go any further, I just kind of had to take everything that I ever thought I knew about Scripture and put it completely out of my mind and start over.
It seems that the need for a spiritual presence in some people’s lives is so strong that they stick with it even when it comes crashing down. Maybe their strong requirement for religion is the reason that they get so easily get caught up with in such destructive groups in the first place? People are made to feel special when they join such a group, recruits think they are about to be part of something remarkable, something worthy of a new sacred text.
If someone convinces you that they are the living prophet, spoken about in the religious text that you abide by, it is very difficult to shun that person away. It is a catch-22 situation, you can either follow the prophet’s every word, even if it means murdering innocent people, or you can detach yourself from the cause but face the risk of being deemed a sinner on judgement day.
And what about the Averys? They were just as much in agreement with Jeffrey Lundgren as the rest of the flock. They were willing to watch his children be abused, they gave Lundgren a vast share of their life savings, they bought guns and ammunition to use against anyone who tried to stop them. If Lundgren had chosen another family to sacrifice who is to say that they would not have participated in the slayings? Of course, this will never be known, but they were just as much part of a brain washed flock as the rest of them.
Although another theory is that the Averys were about to leave the cult as they had become disenchanted with Lundgren’s teachings. In doing so they would have become a real threat to Lundgren as other members could have been provoked into following suit.
Nobody will ever know if Lundgren was just a con-man who indoctrinated his followers, or a dilluded man who really believed what he was preaching.
Either way, Jeffrey Don Lundgren managed to get on side 12 intelligent, stable people who all played their part in committing five murders. Of course they are all victims, even Lundgren, if he is in fact mentally deranged, but three completely innocent children were killed that night, children who were not yet at an age to make any decisions for themselves. Their parents had taken them – unintentionally – into an unsafe environment in which they never got to live a true life. Is fanatical religion really worth that?
Aum Shinrikyo
The Aum Supreme Truth Terrorist Organisation
Chizuo Matsumoto had one ambition in life and that was to be rich. As the fourth son of a poor weaver, he had very little as a child. Times were hard for the family and they scraped together enough to be able merely to exist. Therefore, from a young age, growing up in southern Japan in the 1950s, Chizuo dreamt of being wealthy and having money to spend.
The young Chizuo also suffered from infantile glaucoma, a condition he had had since birth, rendering him blind in his left eye and only partially sighted in his right. To add to the misery of poverty, Chizuo was teased mercilessly for his disability and eventually his parents moved him to a government-funded school for the blind.
ROLE REVERSAL
The tables quickly turned and where Chizuo had suffered at the hands of the bullies in his former school, he now found himself, the only student with partial sight in a blind school, in a position of power which he exploited to the full. He dominated the other children and bullied them into doing whatever he told them to. His limited vision began to work in his favour financially too, and he would assist the other students in various tasks, but only if the price was right. The quest for money dominated his school life, and his reputation steadily worsened. So scared were the other children though, that nobody stood up to Chizuo and his behaviour was allowed to continue. By the time Chizuo graduated, a successful student with good grades and a black belt in judo, he had extorted a sum in the region of $30,000 from his fellow classmates.