The Polygamist's Daughter | Anna LeBaron | Joni Table Talk

a polygamist cult a deadly plan the four o'clock murders as they would come to be known were a coordinated attack that shook a nation but perhaps even more shocking is the disturbing revelations about the family at the center of this controversy [Music] it was a story that made national news headlines a string of brazen murders a polygamous cult and at the center of it all a self-proclaimed prophet with a secret deadly scheme it was this man what led to these violent acts in the aftermath the truth that emerged was something far more shocking than anyone could have imagined to those closest to him he was the symbol of religious piety yet the truth would reveal him as a violent leader driven to make his followers submit to his will from his communal home base in Mexico he would rule with an iron fist the husband of at least 13 wives in more than 50 children Ervil LeBaron commanded obedience even forcing his children into difficult labor at his appliance repair shops for honor LeBaron this was her reality not just a story that she saw on the news her childhood was one of pain and loss today Ana lives free from the shackles of her polygamous roots but it would be a journey that would change her life forever so let's go back to the beginning and talk a little bit about your birth and growing up and explain to our audience what was different about your upbringing well I was born and raised in a violent polygamist cult my father was the leader of the cult he had 13 wives and fathered 50 children Wow so when I was born our family lived in Colonia LeBaron the LeBaron colony down in Chihuahua Mexico a lot of people don't realize that here in America there are a lot of polygamist colonies a lot more than we realize yes there's a lot of people that practice the fundamentals of their faith is so they want to be called fundamentalist Mormons because they practiced the original teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith who founded the Mormon the modern-day Mormon faith they're the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints now they don't practice polygamy anymore the Mormon Church disavowed polygamy in 1890 so there's a split where as fundamentalists still practice and the modern day church that doesn't so tell us a little bit about growing up in a polygamous community obviously obviously there are a lot of children and there are a lot of wives but as far as you seeing your dad growing up you really didn't see him because he was in trouble with the law and always running and in trying to get away from the law so you didn't really have a relationship with him did you no I probably was in the house you know at times when he was physically there but he would come and go at night and they would hide him in the back bedroom so we wouldn't even be aware of his presence mm-hmm and so I didn't actually converse with my father until I was nine years old so what was that first meeting like we had been taught to revere him we I knew I had a father but I just didn't even know what he looked like so when the day came it was like wow he's coming you know he arrived and we got to I was just watching we weren't allowed to like interact with him like children must be seen and not heard and so I would just peek around the corner and watch him eventually I climbed up on the bed in the little room where he was sleeping or he was working and watched him writing and up until then I don't believe that we said one word to each other mm-hmm and then at some point in the middle of the night he woke me up and asked me if I knew how to make coffee I lied and said I did and then I got up and did exactly what I thought all the and I saw all the other adults doing when they would make coffee and I made him some coffee and brought it to him and he drank it and I went back to sleep and then a few other times he woke me up in the middle of the night again and I made him more coffee so it's so bizarre to think about living kind of in the conditions that you lived in because they weren't very good conditions and I guess was it when you were three years old he actually put a hit was it on his brother who was also a part of the cult yes so tell us about that my father and his brother were Co leading the polygamist group after their father passed away and there was a division in you know the way they wanted things carried out and so my father split he took some the people that believed in him and the ones that believed in Joel his brother stayed so my father and his family all left the LeBaron colony and then a few years later it was 1972 I was three years old my father ordered a hit on his brother and it was carried out so was it a gun and so he killed his own brother had his own brother killed and so was that the first time that you knew of your dad doing that Amanda you'd find out later but was that one of the first murders or what had there be just one that I'm aware of yeah so from the age of three onward I'm are our family lived in fear constant fear and even though as a child I didn't know what we were afraid of but the fear was palpable and the adults were afraid with the police closing in Orville would soon find himself behind bars for orchestrating the murder of his own brother before his death in the Utah State Prison he pinned his final work the book of the new covenants a 400 page document that gave birth to a cue list which would shock the world and earn the love Aaron's the moniker the Mormon Manson family but for honor the arrest of her father would lead her along with her mother and some of her siblings to move to Houston where they could work and her sister and brother-in-law's appliance repair shop this opened the door for Ana's ultimate escape so what happened we had been living in Denver for a period of time where all that slave labor was happening and you know just horrific living conditions and our family after my family we got moved to Houston and it was while we were in Houston that I got just a little taste of life without with less of the influence caused by my you know father's less of the chaos caused by my father's influence just a little bit of normalcy a little bit of normalcy he was in prison at the time he eventually got caught oh yeah for the crimes he was committing yeah before I was 13 when I was in Mexico we got our home got raided by the Mexican police when we lived in the u.s. we got raided by the FBI hmm they were looking for my father and other group members that had committed these crimes that'll be a blessing for you right because if he had been in the picture at 13 you may not have been able to get away right when I was living in Houston we had just a little thin blends of life a little taste of life in in Denver we had been dumpster diving for food we called it gardening because we would get fruits and vegetables that had been discarded Wow and then we would go gift boxing and that meant diving into the goodwill boxes for clothing and so bhalo we lived in Houston my mom got to grocery shop in the store we were paid for our work we still had to work so it was still a family business like our family did a plant used appliances just about everywhere we went because that's what everybody knew so I was able to save up my money my little allowance and buy a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and you know I was 13 and feeling like hot stuff you know that was a big deal and something you'd never experienced before so how did you get away from the cult and from your from your mom in that whole situation so while we were living there I we got a call and I happened to be on the phone when that happened my mom didn't know I was on the line and I could hear and I overheard the caller giving my mom the news that my dad had been found dead in his prison cell Wow and so after my father passed away you know there wasn't a clear succession as to who was supposed to take over from from what I know there might have been that I'm not aware of but the man that wanted to take over within about a year's time six months to a year's time convinced my mom to move back to Denver to the squalor that we were experiencing there hmm and when I got wind that my mom was thinking about moving back to Denver I wanted nothing to do with it so I called an older sister who was married she had children of her own and it was them that had the business in Houston so I didn't think she would be going to Denver if I called and said I don't want to go to Denver and she said start walking and I made sure I was wearing my Gloria Vanderbilt jeans yes and walked and had some good cheese sauce ahead my key to turn brown tennis shoes yeah that I had bought with my own money oh wow and you start walking towards her house I start walking towards her house I walk just a little over three miles before she found me it felt like I'd walked forever mm-hmm but it was probably about an hour yeah yeah and she found me and sorry I call that you know a little over three miles as a 5k so I call that my 5k to freedom your 5k to freedom so she picked you up and she act we hid you from the family so what happened next when your mom realized you weren't there my mom came looking for me so the first night my sister took me to another sister's house and there's and she put me that let me stay there one night and then we heard knocking at the door and my sister came and woke me up and said go out the window go to the left there's a hole in the fence crawl through and wait and don't come back until I come and get you so you did that so I did that my mom looked for me that night in the house so she came in and she said I know she's here somewhere well I'm not sure what that conversation was because I was out the window uh-huh but she did look for me and then she looked a few other places when she couldn't find me she but all the other kids in the station wagon and then drove back to Denver okay so she left and then something dramatic happened with you pretty soon after that before my mom left before everything happened my sister and her husband that were kind of in charge of the Houston faction of our group they had started a little school in their garage they finished off their garage but all the equipment from and they did AC E which is a Christian curriculum right so they started a church in their garage so that they could actually have this curriculum because there were so many teenagers of my father living there in Houston and working and so we weren't we had all missed so much school from all the moving around we did trying to stay ahead of the law and then when everyone up and moved and I ran away they only had one student left which was not a great way to run a school and so there was a little Christian school that was just down the road from their home at a little church my brother-in-law went and talked to the pastor and they made arrangements to trade in all of their school curriculum and the desks and all that equipment in exchange for my tuition and so they enrolled me in a little private Christian school and the teachers were kind of given some background information about my family of origin so naturally they were just extra carrying extra loving and just showed so much compassion and that was just so different that in the whole environment was so different from anything that I had experienced growing up that I was eager when the opportunity came to accept Christ as my savior and that opportunity came at a youth retreat that I was invited to attend and my sister let me go and that's amazing and there's an interesting that you say the love that they showed you made you want to experience the God that they served because it had left such an impact on you that your little heart was open yeah what did you think it could be closed after you've been through all that religious and legalistic abuse right well one of the teachers prayed one time and when she bowed her head the word came out father and that was so different than the dear Heavenly Father that was very informal yeah and when she used that phrasing and that tone I could tell there was something different about her mm-hm and that that created a longing inside of me yeah you could tell it was personal very much so versus someone saying our dear Heavenly Father and someone saying father yeah finally free of the grip of her family's called honor had a world of possibilities before her but just below the surface something sinister was brewing a murderous plot that would change her world [Music] June 27th and 1988 it was a day like any other no one would have expected that by 4:30 four people would have been shot dead the events of that day were dubbed the four o'clock murders the investigation and subsequent manhunt led to the arrest of five people the orchestrator of these attacks on his half-brother in the aftermath honor would try to piece her life back together is more startling revelations surfaced and headlines across the country a dark portrait of the world that honor grew up in before your father passed away in prison he wrote was it a covenant a book it's called the book of the New Covenant okay if he wrote it as a 400-page rambling document which I've never laid eyes on right oh but other people that I know have things that would be interesting to see it one day yeah so in it he named people that he would like to see murdered well what it was was he while he was still alive and in prison he had ordered everyone to come guns a-blazing that's how mark put it mmm to bust him out of jail and he was a maximum-security prison so everyone on the outside knew it was a suicide mission nobody did it lose nobody was going to mm-hmm and so he considered that a betrayal he left their names in this document the people it was like a hit list of 50 names I don't know how many names are on that list but there was a lot of them yeah and so after he died in this book how did it even get into the hands of some of the community the cult community I don't know exactly because I wasn't part of that but I've heard that his attorney um took it out of the prison just with client confidentiality and that he he was the one who brought it out I don't know if that's a fact or not yeah and so anyway it got placed in the wrong hands of people who were law to your father so after his death there was something that was in all the news and some of you watching may remember it was called the four o'clock murders so tell us what happened tragically as a result of your dad writing this document well he died in 1981 I ran away in 1982 and was enrolled in that little school so I'm saying those dates just to give you a timeline mm-hmm it was 1987 when the first person that was on that list was killed my sister and brother-in-law had already separated themselves from the cult at that point both of them had become believers as well a mark the your your half sister's husband was just like a father to you would you say he was kind of like a father he filled that role yeah I mean I worked with them I lived in their home I worked alongside of them in a loving way very much yeah very much so they were a good influence and they were they were the heroes of my story yeah so his name was on the list Mark's name is on the last name was on the list so after in 1987 when the first person was killed marks at me and his son down his oldest son and his wife my sister and just told us what was happening and that his name was on the list and that we needed to be more careful and you know be more alert and vigilant and you know for a period of time we lived in that constant state of what's gonna happen and and then you know time moves on and you you kind of lose that sense of urgency about it in June of 1988 so not even a year later you know our worst nightmares came true what happened people in my family my siblings um came and they killed three different people along with a little girl so there were four people that got killed that day and the little girl happened to witness her father being killed so she was killed too as just because she witnessed it so four people died so where was Mark when this happened and weren't you supposed to possibly be there that day I worked alongside of him and his wife and this was that what at their company okay but their effused appliance business okay and so in all the time that I had lived with them very rarely had I missed any days of work and on this day I had experienced an illness which was eventually was diagnosed as walking pneumonia and had spent months in and out of the doctor's office trying to get better but because I was working not resting like the doctor had ordered yeah I was not getting well yeah so you were really sick that morning so I had gone to the doctor that weekend the Friday before that happened and I was prescribed a really strong narcotic and so even though I was taking this very strong narcotic to just knock me out so I would actually rest and I got up that morning took my medicine and was ready to go to work and that day my sister came and seeing me all groggy on the couch you know she said why don't you just stay home today that was the first time I had heard those words come out of her mouth Wow anything like that because she was a hard worker too so you stayed home and but that would be the day that they came into the store with a gun uh-huh and killed him and they killed him so what happened when you heard about him being killed I got a phone call at the house I'm from one of my men that worked in the shop and he said that somebody was on their way to the house that I was supposed to gather the children and put them in the vehicle and go with this person and not asking questions and I immediately knew something was wrong I didn't know what but I knew something was desperately wrong and so we did when that car came around the corners wheeling tires um it just so much fear just overtakes you and you don't know what's wrong yet and so I gathered the children and we took him to a safe house and and waited and eventually um our pastor and his wife came in and told us what had happened mm-hmm so that had to be so devastating did that shake your faith at that point because I know you you love the Lord but were you shaken by that or did you find yourself running into the arms of the Lord well we were just all in shock I mean we were in shock for a long time growing up we had just been taught how to stifle emotion in order to just keep moving through life and so that's what I did I just kind of held it in and and did what I was supposed to do um I ended up going to the shop and helping identify some things and getting some banking documents and just seeing you know the devastation that was left yeah the blood and you just kind of carry on because you have to write and at the funeral where all four of them were there um I remember thinking to myself everybody else here has lost more than you my mother had lost a son my sister had lost a husband their children had lost a father you know just so I said be strong for them and so that's how I moved through that situation yeah well I think that one of the things I love about your story is that you did make it through all of that God was faithful but years later you would go through freedom ministries at Gateway you'd go through to Kairos which are two great programs by the way that helped deal with past hurts and past wounding and you kind of almost have to allow the light to be shown on those things and bring it to the surface for the Lord to be able to heal because had you not gone through that restoration and healing process I don't think you'd probably be able to sit here and tell your story right I began professional counseling at the urging of a friend in 1995 I was grown adult with children of my own and finally um I didn't realize I needed help I didn't understand that the way I was living my life kind of just with emotion always at bay mm-hmm so would you say that for people watching who have gone through very traumatic events that there is an inner healing that can take place that needs to take place before you can really move on into what God has for your life or it will really stagnate the will of God don't you think yes absolutely just being able to fully express all of the emotions that God gives us as humans there's no whole spectrum of them yeah um has been such a freeing experience for me so what happened with you to finally bring that healing I know you went to freedom classes you went to Kairos but what was it that had to happen in your soul before you could really be well it was a process it was yah in 1995 with five years of professional counseling and then in 2005 I began attending gateway Preston for freedom mm-hmm and and went through a process of just learning to identify or to find my identity in Christ I remember the first class I went to it's called levels of change and in there he Bob HAMP is the teacher of that come talks about how it's your identity in Christ and finding that and knowing that that that changes everything else about you and because I had spent so much time seeking healing and wholeness um I recognized that day that something else this is what I needed to pursue my identity and finding my identity in Christ and so I had what I call my Jacob's Ladder moment where I identified that as the goal and then basically just said this is where I'm camping out and I will not let go until you've left me mm-hmm and that process took several years of me showing up showing up showing up pressing in for freedom pressing in for wholeness in healing and then there came a time where you know I'm walking through my living room and I was having just a rough week you know I'm a mom of five kids and working mom of five kids right and you know life was a little bit shaky then and I I'm feeling like you know the plates are spinning and some are falling it's not all the receiving really some are wobbly and sort of fallen and broken you know you know yes yes so there I am walking through my living room having had a rough week and God whispers to my heart and says oh no if you killed over right now I would welcome you and say well done good and faithful servant mmm because in my head even though I knew better in my head I always thought I need to have my act together I need to be able to do this life well in order to be accepted Wow and that moment it's like was a changing day for me knowing that it wasn't about my performance it wasn't about me being able to have my act together or keep all the plates spinning if you will yeah I bet he it was already a done deal right I was already accepted yeah we've all heard it said there's no place like home but for many home is a scary place and it can leave deep emotional scars that take years to heal if that's you today you don't have to carry around that pain you can find that same peace and healing that on a found just call the toll-free number on your screen because we have prayer partners standing by waiting to take your call your past does not have to define your future you can also contact us by going today Starcom and clicking on prayer because we pray over all the prayer requests come in today star for more on on his remarkable story you can pick up a copy of her book the polygamous daughter it's available now and you can visit her online at on a LeBaron dot-com as always we'd love to hear what you thought of today's program so be sure to leave us a comment on Facebook or Twitter thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time this has been a day star television production [Music]

Channel: The Way Of Life Church

Views: 36,739

Rating: 4.7592592 out of 5

Keywords: the way of life church, groeschel, lifechurch, life.churchtv, church, god's word, sermon, Christian, bible, God, Joni Table Talk, Joni, The Polygamist's Daughter, Anna LeBaron

Id: hgBGOpAyhpg

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2017