Irene Spencer

Irene Spencer is an American author and a widow of Verlan LeBaron, brother of former prophet Joel LeBaron of the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot.

Early life

Irene Golda Kunz was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1937. She secretly wed Verlan LeBaron on July 3, 1953, becoming his second wife. His first wife was her older half-sister Charlotte. Irene would eventually bear 13 of Verlan's 58 children.

Married life

Following her marriage to Verlan, she moved to a farm called "Colonia LeBaron" in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Northern Mexico. Colonia LeBaron had been settled by Verlan's father Alma Dayer LeBaron after the Manifesto of 1890 when the mainstream LDS Church abandoned polygamy. When Alma died in 1951, he passed leadership of the polygamist community down to his son Joel, who formally organized the Church of the Firstborn in the Fulness of Times in Salt Lake City, Utah.

A power struggle ensued between the sons of Alma Dayer LeBaron. A younger son, Ervil, founded his own church, the Church of the Lamb of God, in 1972 in San Diego, California, and later that year ordered the murder of his brother Joel, claiming justification based on the doctrine of blood atonement. Ervil's hitlist would eventually reach the hundreds and include John F. Kennedy and the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Besides Joel, he would succeed in murdering his pregnant daughter Rebecca and Rulon C. Allred, the President of the Apostolic United Brethren, another key polygamist group. Rulon Allred was Irene's mother's brother, and one of the reasons Ervil had him killed was so he could kill Verlan at Rulon's funeral.