Ervil LeBaron came from a family of Mormon fundamentalist polygamists who had established a colony in Chihuahua, Mexico. His brother Joel founded the Church of the First Born of the Fulness of Times in 1955, and Ervil was his second-in-command until they fell out over authority in 1970.
Ervil then founded his own church and issued a revelation: that he held the keys of the kingdom, that those who opposed him were guilty of the unpardonable sin, and that blood atonement applied to them.
Blood atonement is a doctrine associated with some nineteenth-century Mormon rhetoric and repudiated by the mainstream church, holding that certain sins are so grave that they can only be expiated by the sinner's own blood. LeBaron reinterpreted it as an instruction. Killing an apostate was not murder; it was a religious duty that saved the apostate's soul.
The relabelling is chapter 76's mechanism and it is doing the same work as poa in chapter 158. It does not ask followers to overcome moral revulsion — it redescribes the act so revulsion does not attach.
Joel LeBaron was murdered in Ensenada in August 1972 on Ervil's order. Over the following decade at least twenty-five people were killed, including rival polygamist leaders, defectors from Ervil's own church, and family members. Rulon Allred, the leader of a competing group, was shot dead in his chiropractic office in Salt Lake City in 1977 by two of Ervil's wives.
The structure that made this sustainable was kinship. Ervil had thirteen wives and more than fifty children, and the church was largely composed of his family. Recruitment was reproduction.
That produces an exit cost with no equivalent elsewhere in this part. Leaving a group of strangers means losing a community. Leaving your family means losing your mother, your siblings, your children and your spouse simultaneously, and there is no outside network to fall back into because you have never had one. Chapter 166's placement marriage and chapter 173's shunning both approximate this; kinship-based recruitment achieves it structurally.
Written revelation put the commands beyond argument. LeBaron produced a document, The Book of the New Covenants, containing his teaching and a list of enemies.
He was convicted of Allred's murder in 1980 and died in the Utah State Prison in 1981.
The killings did not stop. On 27 June 1988, in what became known as the four o'clock murders, three former members and the eight-year-old daughter of one of them were shot dead in Houston and Irving, Texas, at the same hour, by LeBaron's children — executing a list their father had left behind.