Jeffrey Lundgren was a tour guide at the Kirtland Temple in Ohio, the first temple built by the early Latter Day Saint movement, employed by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He gave scriptural lectures to visitors and was good at it.
By the mid-1980s he had gathered a group of followers who left the church with him. About twenty people, several families among them, moved into a farmhouse and sold their homes, pooling the proceeds. Members turned over their wages. Lundgren controlled the finances and the living arrangements.
His teaching was that he was a prophet, that the group would receive a revelation permitting them to seize the Kirtland Temple by force, and that they would then see God.
The Avery family — Dennis, Cheryl and their three daughters, aged fifteen, thirteen and six — had joined and had given the group their savings from the sale of their home. Lundgren judged them insufficiently committed. Dennis Avery had not turned over everything, had questioned decisions, and was, in Lundgren's account, a Judas.
He declared that the Averys were sinners whose deaths were required by scripture, and cited chapter and verse.
On 17 April 1989, the five members of the family were taken one at a time into a barn on the property, bound, gagged and shot dead in a pit that had been dug in advance. The men of the group participated in the killings and in the preparation. The women had prepared a meal.
Two mechanisms are doing the work here and they are both from earlier chapters.
Moral justification, in Bandura's framework: the killing was reframed as a scriptural requirement, so the followers were not overcoming a prohibition against murder but obeying a higher one. The chapter and verse mattered — these were people who took scripture seriously, and the doctrine was addressed to them in the terms they respected.
And diffusion of responsibility. The killings were divided among several men, each performing part of a sequence, in a group setting, on an order from above. Chapter 9's mechanism applies to inaction; here it applies to action, and the effect is the same: each participant's felt culpability is a fraction of the whole.
The group left Ohio afterwards and dispersed. The bodies were found in January 1990 after a member told his father, who told the police.
Lundgren was convicted in 1990 and executed by lethal injection in Ohio in 2006. His wife Alice and son Damon were convicted of murder. Several other members received lesser sentences and have since spoken about how it happened.