INTRODUCTION

I was born some time ago,
Way out in the sticks,
In a valley of old Mexico,
In 1946.
(So begins my saga.)

“I am conscious that my narrative
savers of incredibility:
The fault is in the subject,
not in the narrator.”
~The City of the Saints,
By Richard F. Burton,
1861
*(quote borrowed from Irving Wallace’s
outstanding biography,
“The Twenty-Seventh Wife”)
1961

************

  The Cards of Life

Life dealt me cards — I played my hand
With confidence — I had it planned …
When, later, life revealed the score
It shook me to my very core!
I wondered then — still wonder now:
Could I have changed my life somehow?
And — if life dealt this hand again —
Would I repeat my life of pain?
Or would my hand, ignoring me,
Repeat this life and destiny?
“Hiding in a Cave of Trunks”
By Ester Benjamin Shifren
2012

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“I learned that even when life deals you a bad hand,
you can still have a happy life if you are willing
to take a chance and put the past behind you.”
~Illegitimate
Brian Mackert
2008

  December 10, 2016

In four months I will turn 71, and it will be the 50th anniversary of my 1967 escape from living “The Principle” (plural marriage/ polygamy) in the now largely extinct bizarre,  backward, dangerous Mormon fundamentalist LeBaron cult that was headquartered in Colonia LeBaron, Galeana, Chihuahua, Mexico.

I was born and raised a fourth-generation Mormon polygamist — “polygamist” meaning anyone who believes in and lives polygamy. My great-great-grandfather, Benjamin F. Johnson, a bright and gifted writer, was one of the self-proclaimed Prophet Joseph Smith’s personal Scribes, starting at the tender age of eighteen. (Joseph Smith also sealed him to himself as a son! So in a roundabout way, that makes Joseph Smith my Great-grandfather, three places removed!)

That’s the most prestigious bloodline one can come by if one is Mormon. Mother didn’t mince beans about letting me and my thirteen siblings know we were “part of the royal blood” — and she held her head high as she proclaimed we were of this enviable hierarchy.

Actually, we came by way of “Royal Bloodlines” in more ways than one: We Spencers are also related, through my father, to Princess Diana Spencer, Winston Spencer Churchhill, the two Pres. Bush families — and other such.

We even could have been children of the self-proclaimed prophet, the late Rulon Jeff’s: While Mother was single, in the early 1940s, and living in Utah, she dated polygamist Rulon Jeffs, father of the now incarcerated, infamous FLDS leader, Warren Jeffs!

As my youngest sister Lenora (born on my wedding day!) likes to facetiously say,”Warren Jeffs could’ve been another brother by another mother!” And I like to retort, “We also could’ve been his sister by a different Mister!” (Heaven forbid!)

Even more ironic, when you consider how “royal” our blood is, is Mother’s brother and my once beloved Uncle Ervil is the now-deceased infamous criminal known to the world as the “Mormon Manson,” or “Evil Ervil” LeBaron — or the past “Mormon Mafioso” and Malevolent Dictator of the now-extinct Lebaron Crime Family.

Uncle Ervil was, at one time, the all-powerful, priestcraft-working, cult-creating Uncle whom I had been taught, as a kid and member of the cult, stood as “The Second Grand Head” — next only to my Uncle Joel, the self-proclaimed prophet of “The Church of the First Born.”

I had known, loved, feared, revered, and respected Uncle Ervil — before his scandalous schizophrenic psychosis and sociopathic psychopathy worsened, leading him completely and hopelessly off the deep end.

Another unusual coincidence is that my Aunt Irene LeBaron Spencer, best-selling author of the Memoir, “Shattered Dreams,” used as her second book’s cover (“Cult Insanity“– A book about Uncle Ervil, et Al, and the LeBaron cults) a photograph I took of Uncle Ervil holding my daughter when she was eight years old — before I knew he was a paranoid schizophrenic and psychopath.

You can view this photograph that’s now on her book cover. See Aunt Irene’s book, “Cult Insanity,” in my Menu under “Media on Some of My Extended Family.” Uncle Ervil’s then right-hand man, my brother-in-law Dan Jordan, is also in the picture.

I took this picture of them in 1972 when I was still a student at UCLA. The two had come to my home, at Mother’s request, to go with me to the US Immigration Office to bear witness that I was indeed an American.

I needed to get my US citizenship papers in order to become a public schoolteacher in the United States. I was born in old Mexico of American parents but they didn’t register my birth with the US Embassy in Mexico. So now I was having to verify my citizenship in order to get these needed legal documents.

 I had no idea, when Uncle Ervil LeBaron and my brother-in-law Dan Jordan came to my home, they were at that very moment plotting the murder of people such as my Uncle Joel LeBaron, my Uncle Ervil’s own brother and the self-proclaimed “Prophet” of their backward, isolated Chihuahuan-desert cult I had escaped from five years earlier.

I consider myself lucky these two sociopaths/ psychopaths (my brother-in-law Dan Jordan and my Uncle Ervil LeBaron) didn’t kill me during that visit — I being a “daughter of perdition” for having abandoned their so-called church.

I think all that saved me is, even though I fled my uncle Joel’s and Ervil’s cult five years earlier, Uncle Ervil held a fantasy I was actually going to go to all the trouble to get my Bachelor’s Degree and Teaching Credential, then return to his cult to teach “the Saints,” for free, of course — as I had from ages fourteen to nineteen. Well, thanks but no thanks!

I had started teaching in the LeBaron colony shortly after my family repatriated to Mexico in 1960 to live again in LeBaron, a colony my maternal grandfather Dayer LeBaron had started, built on land my father and mother left him when they returned to the United States. I was only one year old then. I was fourteen when my family returned again to live in Colonia LeBaron, Chihuahua, Mexico.

It was seven years later when I managed to escape from the LeBaron cult to return to the United States. That was rather a miracle in itself. But then I miraculously entered a Junior College in Los Angeles within five months after I made it out of the cult! I was twenty-one, at the time, penniless, had a three-year-old child — and only six years of formal education!

When Uncle Ervil came to my apartment in 1972, I was in my fifth year of struggling through college on little education and less money — struggling to get a college degree and a teaching credential so I could get a job as a public school teacher.

Though I loved teaching and wanted to be a teacher, I sure never, ever was going to get stuck barefoot and pregnant again in Colonia LeBaron teaching for free — like I had before. But Uncle Ervil didn’t know what was going on in my mind. That may be why I lived to tell about it!

Going back to where I was before I digressed, as I said previously, the reason Uncle Ervil, bringing along with him his sidekick Dan Jordan, had come to LA was to testify before Officials at the US Immigration Office that I was indeed an American citizen — born in Mexico of American parents.

Uncle Ervil thus helped me get my Citizenship papers in order so I could obtain my Teaching Credential and be able to teach in the US. It was a God-send he did this for me, given that I was considered in his eyes an “apostate.” Apostates are generally left to die by family, relatives, and the rest of the cult. For it is said they have left “the truth.”

Leaving “the truth” was synonymous with turning my back on God and His all-important “Church,” to join hands with the devil. Such people were considered in their eyes to be “the biggest dangers to ‘the Lord’s work’ because they had once known the truth and turned their back on it.” That catchphrase is an understatement and a “glittering generality” used to create a smoke screen so people wouldn’t suspect what they were really up to.

Now I know I have to take understatements, such as that glittering generality above and re-word them. For example, a number of them were involved in illegal activities. They cloaked their illegal activities under the guise of the glittering generality, “We are doing the Lord’s work.“

Another favorite “cloak” and glittering generality they used to cover their secret activities (especially from children or outsiders) was,” We’re doing missionary work,” or “We’re going on a mission,” or “We’re preaching the gospel to these people.”

For example, when I was a kid, my mother used those terms from time to time, as she locked us out of the house (while Daddy was out of town) so she could do “missionary work” (in the missionary position?! LOL!) with some man she was attracted to — and vice versa.

It worked really well because we kids were so indoctrinated as to the perfection of our parents, and the importance of “spreading the gospel, being Saints, and doing what was right,” that it would never have entered our minds that they were doing what was wrong, rather than what was right; i.e., they were not actually preaching the gospel, like they pretended to be doing.

It was years before I realized such statements as “Apostates are the biggest threat to the Lord’s work and the building up of the kingdom of God” were but cover-ups, smokescreens, and understatement for their real fears: Underhanded people in cults greatly fear people who leave their “Church” because they know too much. For example, they know about at least some of the illegal activities done and justified in the name of “bleeding the beast” “to build up God’s kingdom.”

Yes, people like me who leave such a cult “know too much.” And I definitely did “know too much,” though I didn’t realize it at the time. If I want to take my life in my own hands, I may explain to you later what I mean by “knowing too much.” Meanwhile, you can read between the lines.

But going back to my family being related to the “royal bloodlines,” that Mother was so proud to be related to, to be sure, Uncle Ervil (along with his fourteen wives and sixty-something children) was also related to these “royal bloodlines” and very proud of it — as were all his wives, children, and posterity. Quite an irony, yes? You might say I’m getting it from both ends! But as one of Uncle Ervil’s children told me recently, “You can’t choose your family, relatives, nor bloodline.”

Everybody I have told my story to over the past fifty years has said to me,”Your story would make a good movie. You must write a book! If you do, I will buy it. Let me know when it is published.”

I have not written it, until now, because it was not safe for me to tell the truth I wished to write. Only if I could tell the whole truth, did I wish to write my story. It is still not safe. I can’t tell the whole story without compromising my safety and lifestyle. But at long last, I have begun getting this book out that has been building and simmering on my back burners (within) since 1967 when I escaped the Mormon fundamentalist religion/cult I was raised in.

But at long last, I have begun getting this book out that has been building and simmering on my back burner since 1967 when I escaped the Mormon fundamentalist religion I was raised in.

Another reason I have not written my book until now is that for the first fifty years after fleeing the extremist Mormon fundamentalist sect, and thus all my family, friends and foundation there, it was too painful to dwell for long on my past life in that “Church.”

It depressed me so much that I couldn’t write a book on my past even if I had felt my present status and security wouldn’t be compromised by publishing my truth about that past.

I have journaled regularly from age nine till the present day -– did an awful lot of stream-of-consciousness writing. Therapists say that is what kept me from “going under” all these years.

But some may beg to differ. They will tell you that I am crazy/odd/unique/strange/ weird! To such comments, I say, “If only all my writing, reading self-help books, and talking to the occasional therapist could’ve saved me even more from the ravages of my despotic, cultic upbringing! And if only my life could’ve been normal!”

People have enough to deal with and overcome in life without all the deprivations, devastations, and privations that are added to it by being raised in a backward, isolated, cult background.

For starters, it’s very discouraging and humiliating to be seen by others as odd, weird, crazy, different, backward, naïve, gullible, unsophisticated, a country bumpkin, poorly educated, a Plyg — and so on and so forth.

One vain person even jeered as he told me, “You can take the girl out of the mountain, but you can’t take the mountain out of the girl.” All this and more I have had to endure over the years — Even people making fun of my Tex-mex drawl. But there is a bully born every moment. When I take a good look at the people grinding me under, I find their words tell more about them than about me — in every case. And this is so in life.

But as for writing my Memoirs, all I’m sure of is, given a choice of leisure-time activities, writing was and still is likely my first choice, despite how time-consuming and how much work it is. I enjoy writing. I especially like the creative aspect of it.

Through writing, I find company when my isolation and loneliness is otherwise unbearable. And there I unwind from the anxiety, tiredness, and tensions of the day, gain insight and find answers through the inspiration that comes from my “writing meditation” — my deep thinking.

There I cathart (“thot-fart”), find solace, am my own best friend and companion — my mind, my muse, and I … There I unravel the pains, plans, and mysteries of my past as well as my present journey towards self-actualization and individuation. There I grow and develop as I ponder each breakthrough — each step of my awakening into this “brave new world.”

While journaling, I also compare my new insights and experiences with the drama, trauma, and brainwashing of my past. And in my writing, I celebrate and come to better understand each epiphany and step I encounter in my exciting adventure as I look through my new window — my new “looking glass” on the world — and reflect on the past and present.

Actually, like Alice in Wonderland, when I was seventeen and still in the cult, I too, looked through a “looking glass;” i.e., a different window, saw a new window on the world and was catapulted through it and out of that tunnel vision — as well as the tunnel I had been raised in. Yes, I fell right through that new and open window, and out of my secluded cult tunnel into this “foreign world-USA” I have been progressively making my way through ever since.

During my first few years in this new world, I questioned whether I had done the right thing — whether I had indeed been turned over to “the buffetings of Satan” and his wicked world. The longer I was away from the cult and the more I took a good look at what was happening there, the more I was confident that I had made the right decision in 1967 when I fled “God’s only true church,” as the cult calls it.

Many of my past life’s experiences and the brainwashing of growing up in a cult had blocked my feelings and thoughts. Writing helped and is still helping me unblock these feelings and the mind control, thus allowing me to gradually move ahead in my life’s journey, free and unencumbered.

It is through my journaling — and now this blogging and book-writing too — that I assimilate all. Like taking notes in a college course, I compare each new idea, feeling, and insight with the dogma and experiences of my past -– the craziness of the cult I was finally able to escape –- escape from in person, at least.

But try as I may, I have not been able to thoroughly escape from its bind on my subconscious, my persona, and my life. To completely escape my cult-created backwardness, damage, wrong teachings, and other wrongs is one of my fervent goals.

At least it gives me something to live for when all else seems hapless, helpless, and hopeless. And old age threatens to devour me before I’ve even half-fulfilled my hopes, dreams, and goals.

As an aside, I understand the ACLU requests we don’t call the extremist sect I escaped from a “cult.” Also that we don’t say “I escaped,” and was “brainwashed,” for fear we may offend those who belong to what I managed to finally escape!

But my opinion is that such words as “cult” are the truth it takes to jolt -– to help awaken the mind-controlled, brainwashed, true-believing people continuing to be born into and bound by the grips of these Mormon-Fundamentalist doomsday cults. If we can’t use some social pressure, what hope have we to stop this vice vehemently invading our quite-unaware world?

The “political correctness” protectionism of being unable to call it a cult, etc., only helps to reinforce and propagate the captivity of the many born into bondage and White slavery in Mormon fundamentalist religious organizations — that, by the way, are growing by leaps and bounds as I speak, due to polygamy, child bride marriages, mind control measures, and not practicing birth control.

Of course, those embondaged by Mormon fundamentalism are the ones least likely to read what I write. Therefore, I mainly write for those who have managed to get out and are looking for backup material to further assure them they did the right thing by leaving.

And I write for people who want to learn and become more aware. But I especially write for escapees of Mormon fundamentalist groups who are looking for more understanding as to what happened to them in their cult, and why.

I write, as well, for all Mormon fundamentalist sects who are looking for more information on how they can better make it in this “foreign land:” The United States of America; i.e., the normal world they have found themselves in. I hope reading my story of success and redemption, upon having escaped radical Mormonism, will help Mormon fundamentalist cult escapees better make it in their own new existence.

It took me years of University courses, other reading, counseling with therapists, and simply living free from Mormon Fundamentalism before I could stand back and realize what I had grown up in was nothing but a cult. It helped me immensely to understand that! Because then I could better see that I had done the right thing, at age twenty-one, to get out while I could.

And it helped me to know that I had definitely made the right choice — despite being warned that I’d be damned and turned over to the “buffetings of Satan” if I even dared question the words of the prophet, let alone dared  leave “the truth/the church;” i.e., The Church of the First Born of the Fullness of Times, and Mormon Fundamentalism.

The Sociological definition of “cult” is: “A body of religious rites and practices associated with the worship or propitiation of a particular divinity or group of supernatural beings.”

Also: A religious group and way of life that secludes its members from the world so much so that they are unable to fit into normal society. 

The American Heritage Dictionary describes “Cult” as being a religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living communally under an authoritarian, charismatic leader.

That said, I believe that if it looks like, feels like, and rattles like a snake, it is a Diamond Back/ a “cult”! Who are we kidding?! Why call it by any other name? Besides, where is my right to freedom of speech?

And how do we warn or make aware those who could benefit from our observations and experience if we can only cover up for and placate the vice that the Mormon Fundamentalists have already been too adept at perpetrating? To pretend they are not a cult is doing just that: It’s helping to perpetuate the many evils of the Mormon fundamentalist sects.

For example, Mormon fundamentalist sects perpetrate and perpetuate: Lawlessness, being laws onto themselves, Pedophilia, Polygamy, White slavery, Welfare Fraud, Child Labor, Child Abuse, Child Trafficking, Racketeering — and much more, all in the guise of “An alternative lifestyle full of Saints just trying to live God’s laws under the freedom protections of the US government” –- a government they bleed daily, and regularly pray for the destruction of!

Also, note that at the same time the adults in these cults demand “freedom of religion;” i.e., protection from the US government, they, in the name of religion, take away all the rights and protection of the children born into their cult! Yes, they refuse to accept that “One person’s “Rights” end where another person’s “Rights” begin!”

As my years in freedom roll on, since having fled the Mormon fundamentalist “underground” slave trade, barbarism, and bondage I was born and raised in, I continue to become more deprogrammed and more sure of what a wayward, warping, diabolical church/ cult/ monster I was born into and my life ruined by, in the name of religion.

The more I continue to think, question, read books, and listen to educational documentaries and interviews done by Rebecca Kimbel, Doris Hanson, Ed Kociela, Kristen Decker, and others on YouTube, C-SPAN II, and other such, the more aware I become that many of the main tenets I was taught to most revere and embrace were and are complete rubbish; i.e., the total opposite of what is good and righteous.

Therefore, in my Memoir/ blogs, I make it a point to unravel untruths and cover-ups, so as to show the world what I mean by “The total opposite of what is good and righteous.” This way I may better dispel what “the snake;” i.e., “the Diamondback” would have us see as “God’s Plan,” rather than the devil’s!

This is a Memoir as opposed to an Autobiography, because of the leeway given me thus. In other words, though I have, from age nine, kept journals –- They reach from the floor to the ceiling by now — I would never get this history written if I were to go back and uproot every piece of Info in my journals to make sure of the exact day, etc.

So where it is not necessary, I don’t worry about petty details. It’s the big picture that is important. This said, I’ll leave off here to continue my story in “Chapter 1: My House of Cards.” 

Till next time, thank you for visiting my Website — And for reading especially my blogs that tell you what my Memoir’s intentions are. And thank you for just being you.

Cheers,
Stephany Spencer/AKA: Beulah Spencer-LeBaron de Tucker