Kirtland cult murders: The man who led the Avery family to their deaths

Cleveland, Ohio -- Ron Luff has had more than three decades to think about the night of April 17, 1989.

For years, the nightmare of what happened that night and his role in the murders consumed his dreams and his waking hours.

Ron Luff did not pull the trigger and shoot and kill each Avery family member. Jeffrey Lundgren did.

But Luff was chosen by Lundgren to lead Dennis and Cheryl and their three daughters, just children, to the barn where several other followers were waiting.

The dreams

In our interview, Luff described vivid, recurring dreams where he stood up at a long table and faced Jeffrey Lundgren, saying “I mean, there’s something wrong here. I see this, I see that. Next thing you know, I’m walking around the table and I’m refuting all this,” he said.

In the dreams, he saved the Avery family.

“But for years and years, I would think after my incarceration began of a different scenario where, when I went to get Dennis Avery, I wouldn’t take him out the back door to the barn. I would tell him, get your family and go out the front door and turn to the right, and I will meet you on the road. You have to go,” Luff said.

He paused. “Of course, that’s not the scenario that played out.”

As Luff served his time, he decided to do more than reflect on what happened. He wanted to learn from it and do his part to educate people on the dangers of cults and brainwashing.

Luff devoured of books on religion, philosophy, psychology, and the mechanics of belief. He started writing essays and even a book he published in the early 1990s, dedicated to his children with these powerful words: “May the paths of your lives not follow the footsteps your parents have walked.”

Before the Farm

Ronald Luff was born and raised in a family with deep roots in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, called RLDS, an offshoot of Mormonism now known as the Community of Christ.

He grew up in Missouri with a deeply religious family.

“It was a family identity going back ever since my great-great-grandfather,” he said. “He was an apostle in the church.”

After high school, Luff enlisted in the Navy. He served for six years as a mechanical maintenance technician, deploying to the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and South America. He worked his way up to first class petty officer. It’s a rank that requires discipline, reliability, and the ability to follow a chain of command without question. And he was good at it.

By 1984, Luff had left the Navy and was living in Branson, Missouri with his wife Susan, whom he called Susie, and their young children, Matt and Amy. He had a job at a power plant and was on track to oversee the installation of new gas turbines. The future looked stable, even promising. “I had a beautiful career,” he said.

But something was pulling at him. The church he had grown up in was changing, fracturing over questions of doctrine and direction. Luff found himself on the traditionalist side of a widening split, immersed in scripture, teaching adult Sunday school, searching for something solid to hold onto.

“When some of these changes started coming in, I never really got my land legs back, so to speak, after getting out of the Navy,” he said. “And it just sort of took over my life. It took over both of our lives — mine and my wife’s.”

In search of answers, the Luffs made a trip to Kirtland, Ohio, a place of deep significance in RLDS and Mormon history, home to the Kirtland Temple. It was there, on that trip, that they met Jeffrey Lundgren.

The Prophet and The Farm

Jeffrey Lundgren was a lay minister at the RLDS church in Kirtland when Luff first met him.

But over the next several months, the church kicked Lundgren out when his teachings became more radical.

To the church’s leadership, he was a problem. To Ron Luff and his other followers, he was exactly what they were looking for.

“And so that was where the real devotion began,” Luff said, “was becoming convinced that he was this person that was mentioned in the Book of Mormon as the choice seer.”

In the late 1980s, Luff and his family moved to Kirtland, Ohio, joining a group of roughly 20 followers — most from Missouri — who had settled on a 15-acre property on Euclid Chardon Road. There was a white farmhouse, a red barn and orchards. Lundgren’s followers simply called it “The farm.”

Everyone worked, except Lundgren and his wife Alice. His followers held jobs as cashiers, nurses, civil engineers, and forklift operators. Their paychecks went directly to the Lundgrens. In exchange, Lundgren provided housing, food, and most importantly, to people like Luff — answers.

Luff became Lundgren’s second-in-command. Not by ambition, but by circumstance: his Navy background, his discipline, his willingness to follow.

Dennis and Cheryl Avery had been among the first to join Lundgren’s group. They had three daughters — Trina, Rebecca, and Karen. They were true believers, according to former cult members.

They were people who had come to Kirtland searching for the same things everyone else had.

Luff watched the Averys get pushed to the margins of the group — excluded from classes, kept at a distance, drained of their savings. He saw what was happening, but at that point, did not know where it would lead.

“It was heart-rending to watch what looked like they were being pushed away,” he said. “And I think that Jeff just — he never intended for them to be really part of that. And so it’s just the shame the way that they were drained of their lives, before they were drained of their lives.”

The Murders

On the evening of April 17, 1989, Jeffrey Lundgren called the Avery family to the farm for dinner.

After dinner, as darkness fell over the farm, Lundgren called five men to the barn: his 18-year-old son Damon, Daniel Kraft, Greg Winship, Richard Brand and Ron Luff. He assigned each man a role in what would happen next. At the same time, three women watched the children in the house.

When the time came, Ron Luff walked back to the farmhouse and told Dennis Avery he was needed at the barn. Then he came back for Cheryl. And then the children—one at a time.

Trina, Rebecca and Karen, just seven years old.

Jeffrey Lundgren shot and killed all five of them. They were then buried in the mud in the barn.

The Reckoning

Luff was convicted in 1990 at the age of 30. He received five consecutive life sentences for aggravated murder and kidnapping and has no possibility of parole. A clemency request filed several years ago was denied.

He first started serving his time in that isolation cell. “I had nothing to do but the motivation to try and put together what the heck happened to my life,” he said.

“I took everything I thought I knew about God and completely started over,” he said.

From there, he read everything he could find-- religion, philosophy and psychology and books about cults and mind control. He earned a doctorate in pastoral studies. Most recently, he became the library administrator of the prison chapel.

He has spent decades trying to answer a single question: How does a person end up here?

“Sometimes it can look like an execution would have been a little bit easier, a little simpler, certainly less expensive,” he said directly.

“But at the same time, I have to say that I’ve been able to be given the opportunity to learn from it and understand what happened, and in some sense, share that a little bit.”

Ron Luff maintains that he did not plan the murders of the Avery family. He maintains that he did not know, with certainty, that they would be killed that night — though he acknowledges that some part of him suspected that would happen. He does not minimize his role.

“To me, the accountability comes in owning that every day,” he said, “because it’s nothing that’s ever going to disappear. That’s probably going to be with me for the rest of my life. You just can’t redo that. No matter how many times I fantasize that I could, you can’t rewrite the past.”

He still thinks about the Averys.

“I certainly wish they were still alive. I think about them all the time in one sense. But I also remember how much they were committed to this entire thing themselves. And that’s the part about it that I know that the whole scenario could have been different. It could have been me and my family, and they could be sitting here.”

He stops himself. “And that doesn’t sound good to anybody. But I know that was the reality of it.”

Ron Luff is 66 years old. He has been incarcerated for 36 years and will almost certainly die in prison. He agreed to speak with 19 Investigates, he said, because he wants to contribute something meaningful from what remains of his life.

He wants to warn people about the dangers of cults and mind control that still exist today.

“It doesn’t take the brutality that it used to,” he said of cult dynamics in the modern world. “And so with the increase in technology, we have a really heightened responsibility.”

The recurring dreams where Luff walks Dennis Avery out the front door instead of the back eventually stopped. But he said the reality never changed.

“I would hope that I could be reconciled with my children someday,” he said near the end of his interview with 19 Investigates. “But it would never be — that can never be what it would have been. I can’t ever influence their lives in a positive fashion that I wish I had been a better man to do.”

“There was something in me that was weak to succumb to this. And I allowed my family to be taken through that. And I allowed the Avery family to be taken through that,” Luff said.

Ron Luff continues to serve his time behind bars at the Allen-Oakwood Correctional Institution in Lima, Ohio.