Hulu’s 2024 five-part true crime docu-series, Daughters of the Cult, covers Ervil LeBaron, a fringe Mormon splinter-group leader, as told by those who investigated his crimes and escaped his influence — here’s what LeBaron did and why he’s called the “Mormon Manson.”
Ervil was just the most notorious member of the LeBaron family, Mormon fundamentalists who practiced polygamy long after the mainstream Mormon church banned it in 1890. Because of that fact, the LeBaron family went on the run long before Ervil was born to places like Mexico, where polygamist principles could still be followed.
In those conditions, Ervil was born in 1925, and by the 1940s, the LeBaron family established Colonia LeBaron, a polygamist community in Mexico where sexual abuse of women and girls was allowed.
Over time, LeBaron family leaders died away, and Ervil rose to power until he established a new extremist Mormon sect in the desert, the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God, in the late 1960s, according to The Independent.
The LeBaron murders
In the meantime, as Ervil LeBaron’s acolytes followed him throughout Mexico and the Desert Southwest, he ordered his competitors murdered, many of whom were his relatives. Not only did Ervil believe in polygamy, he followed the extremist — and long-discredited — Mormon religious principle called blood atonement, or the belief that certain behaviors can only be atoned for by shedding blood.
Among other crimes, LeBaron is now linked to at least 30 murders, leading to the menacing nickname, the “Mormon Manson.” All the while, LeBaron continued to engage in polygamy and the sexual abuse and assault of women and girls.
LeBaron was extradited to the U.S.
By 1980, Ervil LeBaron was extradited to the U.S. from Mexico and convicted for his crimes. By 1981, he died in prison from an apparent suicide, but he left a hit list behind him, ordering his family to commit still more murder in his name, a vendetta that’s believed to have continued well into the 1990s. Those killings included a now infamous murder spree in Texas in 1988, referred to now as the “Four O’Clock Murders.”
In 2017, Anna LeBaron, Ervil’s daughter from one of his many wives who escaped LeBaron’s fundamentalist Mormon community, told the BBC that her father, Ervil, used fear to control and manipulate people. “We were absolutely afraid of not doing what we were told. And we didn’t have a voice,” she said.
The Ervil LeBaron documentary series Daughters of the Cult premieres on January 4, 2024, on Hulu.
