The 2009 Murder of Benjamín LeBaron
Men in police and army uniforms broke into Benjamín LeBaron's house on the night of July 7, 2009, and beat him in front of his wife and five children. When his brother-in-law, Luis Carlos "Wiso" Widmar, heard the noise and ran over to help, they took him too. Both men were found dead hours later on a roadside, a message left with the bodies. Benjamín was thirty-two. He had spent the previous two months doing something almost no one in northern Mexico dared to do: standing up to the cartels in public and winning.
The men who killed him were sending a warning to an entire community, and the community understood it perfectly.
Colonia LeBarón is a story about a refuge that kept turning into a target. Its founders crossed a border to escape one kind of persecution and built a farming colony in the Chihuahua desert where they could raise their families the way their faith demanded. What they could not escape was violence — and the cruelest part of the colony's history is that the first blood was spilled not by outsiders, but by one of the founder's own sons. The LeBarons have been bled twice: once from within, by a prophet who had his rivals executed, and once from without, by a drug war that turned their roads into killing grounds. Through all of it, they have refused to leave the ground they claimed.
Why Mormon Polygamists Fled to the Mexican Desert
Polygamy pushed the LeBarons south long before any of them was born. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage from its earliest years, and by the 1880s the United States government was jailing men for it and threatening to seize church property. In 1890 the church issued the Manifesto ending new plural marriages, and Utah's path to statehood cleared. For families who believed polygamy was a divine commandment rather than a negotiable policy, the Manifesto was a betrayal.
Mexico offered a way out. President Porfirio Díaz encouraged American settlers into the sparsely populated north, and the anti-polygamy laws on Mexico's books went largely unenforced. Latter-day Saints established a cluster of colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora in the 1880s — Colonia Juárez, Colonia Dublán, and others — where plural families could live beyond the reach of U.S. courts. The Mexican Revolution shattered most of them. In 1912, anti-American violence forced a mass evacuation, and the majority never came back.
Alma Dayer LeBaron and the Founding of the Colony
Alma Dayer LeBaron built his kingdom out of that wreckage. Born in Colonia Dublán in 1886, he grew up among the Mexican colonies, fled the Revolution to Utah, and there took the plural wives — Maud McDonald and Onie Jones — that his faith and his neighbors' faith no longer permitted. In 1924 he brought his large family back across the border, only to find that the returning Latter-day Saints of the old colonies wanted nothing to do with his polygamy. So he did what his tradition had always done when rejected: he went off alone and started his own settlement.
The land was poor and the family was poorer. The LeBarons scraped a living from pecan orchards and row crops on a strip of desert in Galeana municipality that would eventually stretch six miles along the highway and four miles wide. They named it Colonia LeBarón in the 1940s. For fifty years the family migrated back and forth across the border, sons serving as missionaries, the community surviving on faith and hard labor and very little else. Alma Dayer LeBaron died in 1951 believing he had founded a new priesthood line descending from Joseph Smith himself. His sons would spend the next decade killing each other over who inherited it.
Building a Fundamentalist Kingdom in Galeana
The colony became a real institution in 1955, when three of Alma's sons — Joel, R. Wesley, and Floren — founded the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times. Its central claim was audacious: that the LeBaron line held the "patriarchal priesthood," a chain of divine authority passed down secretly from Joseph Smith, making its holder the rightful leader of God's kingdom on earth. This was not a modest breakaway sect content to be left alone. The Church of the Firstborn was one of the few Mormon fundamentalist groups that actively proselytized, sending missionaries to distribute tracts outside the gates of Temple Square in Salt Lake City and on the campus of Brigham Young University — hunting for converts in the heart of the church that had cast their kind out.
Polygamy, Isolation, and Daily Life in the Colony
Life inside the colony was defined by scarcity and control. Families were large, plural, and interlocking, with children numbering in the dozens per patriarch. Women raised those children in relative isolation, in a Spanish-speaking country whose language many of them barely used, on orchards that demanded constant labor. The community was insular by design — a self-governing enclave where the founding family's authority was religious, economic, and total.
Accounts from people who grew up inside describe a childhood that the outside world would recognize as neither idyllic nor free. Anna LeBaron, a granddaughter of Alma Dayer, was born in the colony and later wrote of beatings, hunger, underage marriage, and children shuttled between houses and states to keep the family's secrets. The colony was a place people were born into and, for a long time, not a place they were free to leave. Whatever peace the desert had promised Alma Dayer, his descendants inherited something harder.
Ervil LeBaron: The "Mormon Manson" Who Turned on His Own Family
Ervil LeBaron was six feet eight inches tall, charismatic, and convinced that God spoke through him alone. He served for years as the number two figure in his brother Joel's Church of the Firstborn, holding the office of "second grand head" and running the church's affairs with a zealot's intensity. What Ervil wanted was the top. When Joel demoted him in the early 1970s, Ervil did not accept it as a family dispute. He declared that he held the true priesthood, that his brother was a false prophet, and that God had authorized him to enforce the difference with blood.
The Priesthood War After Alma's Death
The seeds were planted the moment Alma Dayer LeBaron died in 1951. Four sons — Joel, Ross, Ervil, and Verlan — each had a claim, or believed they did, to the authority their father said he carried. The Church of the Firstborn was Joel's project, and for a time Ervil served it faithfully. The break, when it came, was not over money or land but over the one thing a fundamentalist prophet cannot share: divine legitimacy. Ervil split off and formed his own group, the Church of the Lamb of God, and built into its theology a doctrine that made murder a sacrament.
The Church of the Lamb of God and the Assassination of Joel LeBaron
On August 20, 1972, two of Ervil's followers found Joel LeBaron in Ensenada, Baja California, and shot him in the head on Ervil's order. The founder of the Church of the Firstborn, the man who claimed the priesthood of Joseph Smith, was killed by gunmen dispatched by his own younger brother. It was the first murder in a campaign that would consume the next two decades.
Ervil justified it through "blood atonement," a fringe interpretation holding that certain sins could only be cleansed by the sinner's death. In practice, the sinners were always Ervil's rivals — leaders of competing polygamist sects, apostates who left his church, defectors who knew too much, family members who defied him. He trained his own wives and children to carry out the killings. As one relative later summarized the logic of the movement: everyone who does not believe what you believe is an infidel.
Blood Atonement, the Killing Lists, and Ervil's Death in Prison
The body count climbed into the dozens. In May 1977, two of Ervil's followers walked into the Salt Lake City clinic of Rulon Allred — the leader of a rival and far larger polygamist group — and shot him dead among his patients, an execution ordered to clear Ervil's path to leadership of all Mormon fundamentalism. That killing finally caught up with him. Ervil was convicted in Utah in 1980 and sent to prison, where he was found dead in his cell in 1981.
His death changed nothing. Ervil had spent his final months writing a rambling four-hundred-page document naming everyone he still wanted dead, and his followers treated it as scripture. On June 27, 1988 — a date the survivors would call the "Four O'Clock Murders" — his loyalists carried out coordinated killings in Texas, gunning down defectors and their families at the same hour. A man who had been dead for seven years was still ordering executions. The parallel that reached the public imagination was another American cult leader who turned devotion into slaughter, and the comparison to the death cult behind Jonestown was not far off — Ervil built a religion whose highest expression of faith was killing on command.
Escaping the Prophet: Anna LeBaron's Story
Anna LeBaron was one of Ervil's fifty-one children, born to one of his thirteen wives, and she spent her childhood inside the machine her father built. She was hidden, moved, married off young, and raised to fear the man the family called prophet. At thirteen, she ran. Decades later she wrote The Polygamist's Daughter, an account of growing up as the child of a murderer who quoted scripture, and of the long work of becoming a person outside his shadow. Her escape stands for the many who got out and the many more who did not. The colony that Alma Dayer founded to protect his faith had, in one branch of the family, become something its own children fled for their lives.
The Church of the Lamb of God was Ervil's creation, separate from the mainstream Colonia LeBarón community his relatives kept running in Chihuahua. The distinction mattered little to the outside world, which saw only the LeBaron name and the trail of bodies. It mattered enormously to the colony, which spent decades trying to be known for its orchards rather than its assassins.
When the Cartels Came: Kidnapping and Resistance
The second wave of violence came from outside, and it came for the whole community at once. By the 2000s, Colonia LeBarón sat in the middle of the most contested drug corridor in the hemisphere, a strip of northern Chihuahua fought over by cartels moving product toward the Arizona and New Mexico lines. The LeBarons were visibly prosperous by local standards — pecan farmers with American connections, dual citizenship, and money — which made them a target for the kidnapping-for-ransom industry that metastasized alongside the drug trade.
The Kidnapping of Eric LeBaron and the Ransom the Family Refused
In May 2009, kidnappers took sixteen-year-old Eric LeBaron from the family's land and demanded one million dollars. The family made a decision that ran against every instinct of survival in cartel country: they refused to pay. Paying, they reasoned, would only mark every LeBaron child as a future payday. Instead they organized, protested publicly, pressured the authorities, and demanded Eric's release. After about a week, the kidnappers let him go without a ransom — an almost unheard-of outcome, and a dangerous one, because it made the family look like people who could beat the cartels.
SOS Chihuahua and the Price of Resistance
Benjamín LeBaron turned that one victory into a movement. Eric's older brother, a bishop in the local church and a natural organizer, founded SOS Chihuahua — Sociedad Organizada Segura — to channel the community's fury into pressure on a government that had abandoned the countryside to the cartels. He gave interviews. He led marches. He named the problem out loud in a region where naming it got people killed. Within weeks, it got him killed. The uniformed men who dragged him and Wiso Widmar from his house on July 7, 2009, and executed them on a roadside were answering his defiance in the only language the cartels used.
Benjamín's murder became one of the first killings to galvanize national resistance to Mexico's drug war, a war that had already turned nearby Ciudad Juárez into the deadliest city on earth and would soon do the same to Tijuana. His brother Julián stepped into the role of public voice and never stepped out of it. The colony, refusing again to leave, began training armed civilian patrols to guard its own roads — a farming community turned garrison in a state the government could not hold.
The 2019 Massacre on the Chihuahua–Sonora Border
The single deadliest day in the family's modern history came on November 4, 2019. Three SUVs carrying women and children from the extended LeBaron and Langford families set out along a rough mountain road near the Chihuahua–Sonora border, most of them based not in Colonia LeBarón itself but in La Mora, a related offshoot settlement in Sonora founded by the same broad fundamentalist diaspora. They were traveling between family enclaves, the way they had a thousand times before.
The Ambush of the LeBaron and Langford Families
Gunmen opened fire on the convoy on an isolated stretch of dirt track. Rhonita Miller LeBaron was killed with four of her children, including seven-month-old twins, and their vehicle was set ablaze with the bodies inside. In the other two SUVs, Dawna Ray Langford died with two of her sons, and Christina Langford Johnson was shot after apparently stepping out of her car with her hands raised — her seven-month-old daughter was found alive on the floorboard, in a car seat, where her mother had hidden her before she was killed. Nine people were dead, all women and children, all U.S.–Mexican dual citizens.
The children who lived did so through the kind of courage no child should ever have to find. Thirteen-year-old Devin Langford hid his wounded younger siblings in the brush, covered them, and walked roughly fourteen miles to La Mora for help. Other children waited hours in the desert, some shot, some untouched, one small girl lost for a time after running into the woods to hide. The survivors were the ones who told the world what a machine gun does to a family car on a mountain road.
Mistaken Identity, Cartel Turf, and the Hunt for Justice
The killing landed on a contested seam between the Sinaloa Cartel and La Línea, the armed wing tied to the Juárez cartel, who were fighting over exactly the corridor the convoy was crossing. Mexican authorities offered the theory that the gunmen had mistaken the SUVs for those of a rival group — a case of mistaken identity that turned a family into collateral in someone else's war. The family found that explanation hard to accept for cars full of women and children on a route their community had used for decades. The massacre drew an American president to threaten, on social media, to send help against the cartels, and drew dozens of suspects into a Mexican investigation, including a local police chief the family said had worked the area for thirteen years. Julián LeBaron, having buried his brother in 2009 and now his cousins and their children in 2019, kept saying the same thing in public: that a country trying to fight drugs with violence was turning itself into a graveyard.
Colonia LeBaron Today: The Colony That Would Not Leave
Colonia LeBarón is still there, still farming pecans, still refusing to go. The community of roughly a thousand people has changed in ways its founders might not recognize — more religiously mixed, more integrated with its Mexican neighbors, and far less polygamous than the enclave of Ervil LeBaron's era, with plural marriage now practiced by only a minority. The armed patrols the family organized after 2009 still watch the roads. The name that once meant a murderous prophet, and then meant murdered activists and children, now also means a community that has outlasted both its own worst son and the cartels that keep testing it.
The desert has taken a great deal from the LeBarons and given back very little beyond the stubborn fact of survival. Two waves of violence, forty years apart, from opposite directions, have failed to move them off the land Alma Dayer claimed in 1924. That refusal is the truest thing about the place — the same defiance that let a family stand up to a million-dollar ransom, and the same faith that sent a founder into an empty desert to build a kingdom nobody wanted him to have.
Visiting Colonia LeBaron: What to Know
Colonia LeBarón lies in Galeana municipality in northwestern Chihuahua, reached by highway from Nuevo Casas Grandes, the nearest sizable town, itself a few hours' drive south of the U.S. border at Palomas–Columbus. This is not a museum or a memorial. It is a living, working community of families who have been on the receiving end of extraordinary violence, and it should be approached that way. There are no ticketed tours of the sites where people died, and asking for them would be a grievous misreading of the place.
Travelers should understand that the surrounding region remains genuinely dangerous. The corridor that runs past the colony is still fought over by armed groups, and the roads that the 2019 convoy traveled carry real risk. Foreign governments have long warned against nonessential travel to large parts of Chihuahua and Sonora, and those warnings are not bureaucratic caution — they are the lesson the LeBaron and Langford families paid for in blood.
What the colony offers a visitor is not a spectacle but a confrontation. It asks you to hold two truths at once: that a community built on a doctrine many find troubling, and shadowed by a killer who shared its name, is also a place of ordinary people who buried their children and stayed. Standing on that highway among the pecan orchards, the honest response is not judgment and not sympathy alone, but the simple recognition of what it costs to keep living somewhere the world has decided is expendable. The LeBarons have never accepted that verdict. That is reason enough to remember them.
FAQ
What is Colonia LeBaron?
Colonia LeBarón is a Mormon fundamentalist farming community in Galeana municipality, in the desert of northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. It was founded in 1924 by Alma Dayer LeBaron, an American polygamist who moved his plural family south of the border to escape U.S. anti-polygamy laws, and formally took the LeBaron name in the 1940s. Today it is a community of roughly a thousand people who farm pecans and orchards, are increasingly integrated with their Mexican neighbors, and practice polygamy only among a minority. The colony is best known internationally for two chapters of violence: the murders committed by the founder's son Ervil LeBaron, and the cartel attacks that killed community members in 2009 and 2019.
Who was Ervil LeBaron, and why is he called the "Mormon Manson"?
Ervil LeBaron was a son of the colony's founder who broke away to form his own sect, the Church of the Lamb of God, and declared himself the rightful holder of a divine priesthood. He preached "blood atonement," a doctrine he used to justify ordering the murders of rival polygamist leaders, defectors, and family members who defied him — including his own brother Joel, who was shot dead in 1972. His followers, trained to kill on his command, were tied to dozens of murders over two decades. Ervil died in a Utah prison in 1981, but killings ordered from a list he wrote continued for years, earning him lasting comparison to other American cult leaders who turned devotion into slaughter.
What happened in the 2019 LeBaron massacre?
On November 4, 2019, gunmen ambushed three SUVs carrying women and children from the extended LeBaron and Langford families on a remote road near the Chihuahua–Sonora border. Nine people were killed — three mothers and six children, including seven-month-old twins — and one vehicle was set on fire with the victims inside. All were dual U.S.–Mexican citizens, most based in La Mora, a related fundamentalist settlement in Sonora rather than in Colonia LeBarón itself. Mexican authorities suggested the convoy may have been mistaken for a rival group in a turf war between the Sinaloa Cartel and La Línea, and the case drew international attention and dozens of arrests.
Do the LeBarons still practice polygamy?
Some do, but far fewer than in the community's past. The colony's founding church, the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was built on plural marriage, and polygamy was central to daily life through the mid-twentieth century. Over the decades the community became more religiously mixed and more integrated with surrounding Mexican society, and today plural marriage is practiced by only a minority of residents. Many descendants of the original fundamentalist families no longer practice it at all.
Is Colonia LeBaron safe to visit?
The region carries real and ongoing risk. Colonia LeBarón sits within a heavily contested drug-trafficking corridor in Chihuahua, and the roads around it — including the route where the 2019 attack occurred — remain dangerous. Foreign governments have long advised against nonessential travel to large parts of Chihuahua and Sonora. The colony is also a living community of families who have suffered extraordinary violence, not a tourist attraction, and there are no organized tours of the sites where people died.
Are the LeBarons related to Mitt Romney?
The LeBarons and the Romneys are separate families, but both trace their roots to the Mormon colonies established in northern Mexico in the 1880s to preserve polygamy. Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, was born in one of those colonies, Colonia Dublán, in Chihuahua. The colony families intermarried extensively over the generations, so distant kinship ties exist across the broader diaspora, but the LeBarons and Romneys are distinct clans with very different histories.
Sources
Prophet of Blood: The Untold Story of Ervil LeBaron and the Lambs of God — Ben Bradlee Jr. and Dale Van Atta (1981)
The 4 O'Clock Murders: A True Story of a Mormon Family's Vengeance — Scott Anderson (1993)
The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land — Sally Denton (2022)
The Polygamist's Daughter: A Memoir — Anna LeBaron with Leslie Wilson (2017)
Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism — Hans A. Baer (1988)
Mormons in Mexico: The History of the LeBaron Family — Time (2019)
Slain U.S. Citizens Were Part of Mormon Offshoot With Sordid History — NBC News (2019)
Reporting on the Sonora Ambush and Subsequent Investigation — Associated Press (2019–2020)
The Mexican Mormon War — Vice (2012)
Mormonism in Mexico — Elisa Eastwood Pulido, The Mormonism and Migration Project, Claremont Graduate University (2022)
Benjamín LeBarón and the Rise of SOS Chihuahua — reporting collected by MIRA / Americas Program (2011)
