The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land

by Sally Denton

Overview

A Publishers Weekly Summer Reads Selection

“The Colony is one of the most gripping and disturbing true stories I’ve ever come across.” —Douglas Preston

An investigation into the November, 2019 killings of nine women and children in Northern Mexico—an event that drew international attention—The Colony examines the strange, little-understood world of a polygamist Mormon outpost.

On the morning of November 4, 2019, an unassuming caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities—fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century. The massacre produced international headlines for weeks, and prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to send in the US Army.

In The Colony, bestselling investigative journalist Sally Denton picks up where the initial, incomplete reporting on the attacks ended, and delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their homestead—Colonia LeBaron—is a portal into the past, a place that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons’ internal blood feud in the 1970s—started by Ervil LeBaron, known as the “Mormon Manson”—and up to the family’s recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in Colonia LeBaron.

The LeBarons’ tense but peaceful interactions with Sinaloa deteriorated in the years leading up to the ambush. LeBaron patriarchs believed they were deliberately targeted by the cartel. Others suspected that local farmers had carried out the attacks in response to the LeBarons’ seizure of water rights for their massive pecan orchards. As Denton approaches answers to who committed the murders, and why, The Colony transforms into something more than a crime story. A descendant of polygamist Mormons herself, Denton explores what drove so many women over generations to join or remain in a community based on male supremacy and female servitude. Then and now, these women of Zion found themselves in an isolated desert, navigating the often-mysterious complications of plural marriage—and supported, Denton shows, only by one another.

A mesmerizing feat of investigative journalism, The Colony doubles as an unforgettable account of sisterhood that can flourish in polygamist communities, against the odds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631498077
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/28/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	147,688
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Sally Denton is the author of nine books, including bestseller The Bluegrass Conspiracy, and the coauthor of a classic account of Las Vegas, The Money and the Power.

Table of Contents

Prologue She Was the Whitest 1

Chapter 1 "We're Not Radical Cultists" 19

Chapter 2 The Englishman and the Danish Girl 43

Chapter 3 Mountain Meadows Dogs 61

Chapter 4 Zion in a Dry Place 75

Chapter 5 "Am I About to Have a Cain in My Family?" 93

Chapter 6 Saint Benji and the Vanguard 116

Chapter 7 NXIVM: Ignite the Heart 134

Chapter 8 "Water Flows Uphill to Money" 154

Chapter 9 "Innocence Is Shattered" 166

Chapter 10 "An Eden in Contention" 185

Epilogue Sisterhood 203

Acknowledgments 207

Notes 211

Works Cited 241

Index 257

Editorial Reviews

03/14/2022

This intriguing portrait of fundamentalist Mormons in Mexico focuses on the 2019 massacre of three women and six children traveling by caravan on a desolate stretch of road between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Investigative journalist Denton (American Massacre), who is a descendant of polygamist Mormons, describes the military-style attack in stark detail and shares evidence from the resulting investigation pointing to a local drug cartel. But the focus is on the history of the LeBaron family, from its 19th-century split with the Mormon church in Salt Lake City and establishment of Colonia LeBaron in northern Mexico, to the brotherly feud that gripped the clan from the 1970s into the 1990s, resulting in dozens of “blood atonement” murders meant to “provide the victim with eternal salvation when his or her blood was spilled into the earth,” and the family’s recent efforts to stop cartel-organized kidnappings in the region. The LeBarons, owners of pecan farms and other resource-heavy enterprises, also engaged in long-standing water rights disputes with their neighbors. Drawing on interviews with former “sister wives,” Denton brings nuance and sensitivity to her discussion of the LeBarons’ polygamist practices and the status of women in the community. The result is a fascinating tale of religion, violence, and family secrets. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A mesmerizing deep dive into Mormon fanaticism, violence, deceit, mental illness, and misogyny, dating back to the religion’s mid-19th century founding by Joseph Smith."

The Daily Beast - Lewis Beale

"Meticulously researched…. The author couldn’t have found a more bizarro clan to profile than the LeBarons, whose history of murdering family members, mental illness and incest rivals that of the Hapsburgs…. Denton provides an excellent history of a polygamist subculture… [her] book is a testament to what happens when male power, under the guise of religious conviction, goes unchecked."

New York Times Book Review - Julia Scheeres

"Reminiscent of Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, this is exhaustively researched and riveting."

Booklist - Karen Clements

"The Colony is one of the most gripping and disturbing true stories I’ve ever come across. It opens with the horrific massacre of Fundamentalist Mormon women and children in 2019 in northern Mexico, initially thought to be the work of cartel gunmen who mistook their SUVs for those of a rival gang. But the true story is far more complex. In exploring what really happened, Denton, a superb researcher and historian, delves deep into the history of polygamous Mormon splinter sects in Mexico, blood feuds, rivalries, and conflicts over land and water rights, as well as issues of drug smuggling. This is far more than the usual true crime book; it is a deep historical exploration of evil. I could not put The Colony down."

Douglas Preston

04/01/2022

Investigative journalist Denton (The Bluegrass Conspiracy) probes the 2019 massacre of nine women and children as part of a larger study of fundamentalist Mormon sects in Mexico. Dual US-Mexican citizens, the victims of the presumed drug cartel ambush were members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practices polygamy—more than a century after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abolished the practice. Denton ventures back to the establishment of the Mormon church in the 1830s, its bitter internecine conflicts over polygamy and heirship, and the emergence of breakaway sects that emigrated to Mexico. Denton pays closest attention to the troubled LeBaron family, whose cross-border blood feud had claimed dozens of lives in the 1970s. By 2019, Colonia LeBaron had been gobbling up precious Mexican water and land for years, outraging the settlement's poorer Mexican neighbors. Leaders also allegedly consorted with NXIVM, a U.S. cult whose founder was convicted of sex trafficking in 2019. As Denton reveals, the massacre's circumstances are much thornier than official accounts suggest. VERDICT Riveting, insightful, ripped from the headlines, this should appeal to fans of true crime and of Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.—Michael Rodriguez

Library Journal

★ 2022-03-24
A multifaceted exploration of the Mormon communities that moved to Mexico to escape persecution in the 1880s and their increasingly bizarre connections to contemporary Mexican drug cartels.

Denton, the author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy and other acclaimed books, employs the 2019 murder of several young wives and mothers from the sister Mormon communities of La Mora and LeBaron as a point of departure to examine the tumultuous history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the U.S. and along the border. (The author mostly uses the term Mormon throughout the text.) While driving in a caravan along an empty stretch of highway between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, the young mothers were ambushed by members of rival cartels, executed, and burned in their cars. Clearly, they were targeted because they belonged to Mormon fundamentalist breakaway communities in northern Mexico, many of which consisted of wealthy, landowning families in a very poor region, and there had been animosity over excessive water use for their prosperous farms. But this is more than a modern true-crime story, as Denton reaches back into the history of Mormonism and finds a deep well of violence, including the Cain-and-Abel rivalry and “blood atonement” murders involving Joel and Ervil LeBaron from the 1970s to the 1990s and the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1847, when a Mormon militant group murdered a traveling party of 140 innocent immigrants and then tried to cover it up, “the worst butchery of white people by other whites in the entire colonization of America.” The author examines the messianic beginnings of Mormonism with Joseph Smith in the 1830s followed by Brigham Young and later highly flawed leaders, many suffering mental illnesses. Denton also dissects other elements of the Mormon practice, including legacies of male superiority, female servitude, and forced polygamy.

Thorough research and balanced reporting combine in a riveting investigation.

Kirkus Reviews

09/01/2022

Denton (The Profiteers) examines the tangled web of family, faith, and commerce leading to tragedy on a lonely road in Northern Mexico. Denton, a descendant of early converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (denoted in the audio as Mormons), uses the 2019 massacre of nine people from the towns of La Mora and LeBaron as a starting point for a sprawling exploration of offshoot Mormon history from the 1830s to the present. Impatient true crime purists may balk at the number of seemingly random threads pulled, but they lead in many intriguing directions, from the early settlement of Utah to the modern cartel wars. Stops along the way include the flight to Mexico of fundamentalist families determined to retain polygamy, bloody generational interfamily feuds, and the NXIVM cult. Ann Richardson's gentle voice might seem a strange match for the material, but the experienced narrator knows just when to push her intensity higher. She also has a knack for interpreting the various accents of many times and places without mockery, and for keeping the massive cast of people approachable despite often sharing a small handful of names. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Jon Krakauer's work.—Natalie Marshall

Library Journal - Audio