The 4 O'clock Murders

Alternate Titles

• Four O'clock Murders

Description

Texas residents are shocked when, at 4 P.M. an a June day in 1988, four people are slain in precisely timed attacks at three different locations in the state. Police know who the killers are, but cannot convict them. They also know who is giving the execution orders: a man buried in a Texas grave twelve years ago. Dubbed by the media as the "Mormon Manson," Ervil LeBaron believed he was a prophet chosen by God to purify the Mormon faith. Resurrecting the nineteenth-century Mormon tenets of polygamy and blood atonement, he formed a fanatic religious cult - still in existence - which has left bodies scattered throughout the American Southwest. So strong is LeBaron's hold that, even twelve years after his death, many of his thirteen wives and sixty children are still carrying out his orders. It is those orders that frighten law enforcement officials. Before he died, LeBaron penned a chilling last testament to his family, a death list called The Book of New Covenants. To date, five of those on the list have been murdered, and no one involved in the case believes the bloodshed is over yet. Investigative writer Scott Anderson presents an astonishing portrait of America's most bizarre crime family. In a meticulously researched book, Anderson follows the bloody trail of the LeBaron cult over twenty years, and reveals how it has been served by the controversial and hidden history of the Mormon church. As compelling as the best fiction, The 4 O'Clock Murders is all the more terrifying because it is true.

Description

Investigative writer Anderson traces the story of Ervil LeBaron and his Mormon polygamous cult, the Church of the Lamb of God--a "blood atonement" cult linked to at least two dozen murders in the American West and Mexico over the past two decades, both before and after LeBaron's death. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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