FBI seeks to spotlight LeBaron fugitive

FBI agents are seeking to add murderous polygamous family patriarch Ervil LeBaron's fugitive daughter to the agency's notorious Ten Most Wanted list, reinvigorating a decades-old manhunt.

Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron's name has been submitted to FBI headquarters for consideration the next time there's an opening on the list, said Shauna Dunlap, a special agent with the FBI's office in Houston.

"We know there are individuals that know where she is," she said Friday.

LeBaron, now 43, is wanted in connection with four murders in 1988 that were carried out simultaneously in the name of her father, polygamist leader Ervil LeBaron. She is the last of the LeBaron children wanted in the slayings.

In 2007, a man met her in Honduras where she was doing "missionary work," agents said, revealing to the Deseret News on Friday that she was not alone.

"She had a son," Dunlap said. "That's something we hadn't known before."

LeBaron's child would be about 12 now. That information came from the same man who provided a recent photograph of LeBaron to the FBI. Tips that continue to trickle in have not panned out, Dunlap said, but the FBI believes LeBaron is still in Latin America. She is fluent in both English and Spanish and has worked in the past as a teacher.

"The information we had recently does point to Mexico, Honduras and other Spanish-speaking countries," Dunlap said.

On June 27, 1988, at approximately 4 p.m., four killings took place simultaneously in Houston and Irving, Texas. All of the victims were shot in the head, including an 8-year-old girl who witnessed her father's murder.

The deaths are believed to be connected to Ervil LeBaron's scriptures that preached "blood atonement" to those who broke the commandments of his Church of the Lamb of God. Some have called it a "hit list." Ervil LeBaron ordered the assassination of rival polygamous leader Rulon C. Allred in 1977, seeking to unite all of Utah's polygamous sects under one umbrella. LeBaron and members of his family were eventually captured and convicted. He died in the Utah State Prison of a heart attack in 1981.

In the years following his death, there were a series of slayings, suspicious deaths and disappearances involving as many as 30 former church members. In 1992, six members of the LeBaron family were indicted by a Houston grand jury on charges of murder, conspiracy to obstruct religious beliefs and racketeering. Five were convicted.