He said some leaders — spurred by Haight — likely interpreted that message in a way that helped incite already-anxious LDS leaders to plan and carry out the massacre. But Turley said Young did not order the massacre, and when he received word in Salt Lake City that tensions were running high, he sent a message to let the Arkansas immigrants pass unharmed. It arrived too late.

Turley said some 50 to 60 LDS men — then part of a formal Mormon militia — did the bulk of the killing on orders from their superiors, though a few Paiute Indians had been persuaded by John D. Lee to attack the immigrant wagon train three different times in the days before the massacre, killing or wounding a few people but leaving the wagon train mostly intact.

After hatching a plan with Haight and others, Lee approached the wagon train under a white flag after the Indian attacks, offering to help provide the immigrants safe passage if they would give up their weapons and follow his orders on how to proceed, Turley said.

With little ammunition or water left and unsure of other options, the immigrants finally agreed. The women and children in the Fancher-Baker wagon train were separated from the men, and escorted north toward Pinto.

Lee had told the men they were each to be accompanied by an armed militia man "to protect them from Indian attack," saying the Indians would not harm the women or children. As the company of men followed their families to the north, and the women and children crossed what is now state Route 18, an oral signal was given.

At that point, "each (militia) man turned to the man at his left and shot him at close range," Turley said, and others began killing the women and children, who ran back toward the men for help. Those that were able to escape the first shot and ran for cover were "intercepted by men on horseback and herded like cattle" into a group, where they were murdered.

Two sisters named Dunlap were saved from the killing by Paiute Indians, Turley said, but when Lee was told what had happened, he demanded to know why the Indians had spared them. When they told Lee the girls "were too pretty to kill," Lee retorted, "they are too old to live," and the girls were then murdered, because the plot was to kill all the immigrants old enough to talk about the massacre.

"It was a horrendous, horrendous atrocity," Turley said, resulting in trauma 150 years later not only for the descendants of the killers but particularly for the descendants of those small children who survived the attack, as well as those whose ancestors were murdered at the site.

Turley said he has spent much time at the monument to the victims, and descendants of the wagon train are often found there trying to understand what happened.