The Thirteenth Wife: Escaping Polygamy (Brad Krevoy Television, Motion Picture Corporation of America, All Canadian Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 1) my husband Charles and I watched an interesting but ultimately exhausting film on Lifetime called The Thirteenth Wife: Escaping Polygamy. It was a two-part movie that ran for four hours, and they had already shown part one on Saturday, May 31 but I had skipped it partly because I wanted to watch the 1949 film The Big Steal on Turner Classic Movies with Charles and partly because I wanted to see both parts together in one go. As luck (or previous Lifetime patterns) would have it, they re-ran part one from 6 to 8 p.m. and then followed it up with part two immediately afterwards, so we were able to watch both parts consecutively. Much to my surprise, it turned out to be a (more or less) true story about what was almost certainly the nastiest and most bloodthirsty of the breakaway cults from the Mormon Church, the one led by Ervil LeBaron from the 1970’s until he was arrested in 1979 and died on August 15, 1981. The backstory begins in 1924, when Ervil’s father, Alma Dayer LeBaron, Sr., refused to abide by the Mormons’ official abandonment of polygamy (so-called “plural marriage”) in 1890 under threat from the federal government, which had insisted they were going to invade Utah and take it over unless the Mormon hierarchy renounced polygamy. (I remember doing an interview with Justin Utley, a Gay ex-Mormon singer-songwriter, who explained to me that the Mormons officially abandoned polygamy in this life, but preached you could still practice it in the “Celestial Kingdom,” their term for heaven.) Instead Alma LeBaron fled to Mexico with his two wives and their seven children and set up shop in Galeana in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. He set up a compound called “Colonia LeBaron” and ruled over it until his death in 1951, whereupon his oldest son Joel (Adrian Petriw) took over. In 1972 Ervil LeBaron got restive over Joel’s leadership – the breaking point, at least according to this movie, came when Ervil decided to reward one of his followers by allowing him to marry a Mexican woman who already had a husband – and ultimately had Joel murdered so he could take over.

There was a third LeBaron brother, Verlan, whom Joel had wanted to succeed him, but he was killed by assassins from Ervil’s cult just two days after Ervil’s death. Indeed, one of the most macabre aspects of the Ervil LeBaron story was that he was able to order killings even after his own death via a manuscript he left behind called The Book of the New Covenants (though The Thirteenth Wife’s writer, Anne-Marie Hess, for some reason changed the last word in the title to the singular Covenant) which contained an elaborate hit list of people he wanted killed. Most of them were either renegade members of LeBaron’s own cult (including some of Ervil’s blood relatives) or leaders of rival polygamous Mormon sects. The central character in The Thirteenth Wife is Rena Chynoweth (played by Olga Petsa as a young woman and Felicity Huffman as an older one being interviewed by a reporter about her life in the cult), whose parents were recruited into the LeBaron cult by a team of three missionaries including Ervil LeBaron himself. Rena’s father disappears as a character fairly early on in the story but her mother Thelma (Michelle Harrison) hangs on and totally buys into the LeBaron cult even after Ervil gives her husband permission to marry a second wife. Rena falls in love with a hot young Viet Nam veteran named Dean Vest who’d already been married and divorced before he joined LeBaron’s cult, but Ervil refuses permission for them to marry and insists that he will marry Rena himself as his titular “thirteenth wife.” He’d already been shown molesting her in a large room in the compound’s barn when she was still a child (and is played by Rubi Tupper), so we know he’s a sexual scumbag as well as a control freak who literally believes he’s in direct contact with God Himself and God is telling him what to do. Ervil also starts preaching a doctrine based on the official Mormon principle of “blood atonement,” which is that certain sins are so gross they can only be forgiven if the sinner is killed in a way that actually sheds blood. (In his book The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s biography of convicted killer Gary Gilmore, he explained that the “blood atonement” doctrine is one reason Utah, alone of all 50 U.S. states, still allows the firing squad as a means of capital punishment.)

One frustrating thing about The Thirteenth Wife is that the online cast lists are woefully incomplete, and in particular we’re not told who played Ervil LeBaron even though the actor gave a marvelous rendition of controlled evil. We’re also not told who played Dean Vest, though he’s a hunk to die for. Ultimately Ervil impregnates Rena and promises that their son will be the heir apparent to the cult’s leadership. Unfortunately for Rena, her baby turns out to be a girl instead, and naturally that hooks Ervil’s paranoia big-time and he accuses her of being possessed by Satan. While she’s still pregnant, Ervil assigns Rena and a friend, his stepdaughter Ramona Marston, to kill Dr. Rulon C. Allred, who has a small practice and runs a rival polygamous Mormon sect in his spare time. Ervil’s preachings become more bloodthirsty and he refers to murder as “atoning,” turning it into a transitive verb, as in so-and-so needs to be “atoned.” Ervil’s second-in-command is a man named Dan Jordan (Matthew Harrison, Michelle Harrison’s real-life husband), who mostly carries out the murders Ervil orders. Amazingly, Rena is arrested for Allred’s murder but is acquitted at trial, which naturally Ervil claims as a “miracle” worked by God to demonstrate the sanctity and justice behind the action. Apparently the preposterous disguises Rena and Ramona wore to facilitate the crime actually worked. In part two, Rena’s baby daughter Erin is born and, even though she’s just a baby, Ervil promises her to his sidekick Dan as a plural wife as soon as she grows up. That prompts Rena to make her escape at long last; with her mother and a few other family members, they move from Colorado to Texas and set up an appliance repair shop in Houston. (Appliance repair is a skill Dan Jordan taught them as a way of making money in their redoubt outside Denver.)

Unfortunately, some other members of Ervil’s extended family follow them and literally insist on moving in with them, which causes Rena to worry whether they’ve really broken with Ervil or are there to finger them for Ervil’s hit squads. Also Rene finds herself attracted to Ed Marston, Ervil’s stepson and another renegade member of the cult, and the two make it as far as an open-mouthed kiss and a sexual encounter on Rena’s couch that director Michael Nankin discreetly cuts away from before we get to see any skin. But Ed decides he’s carrying too much cult baggage to marry Rena, and instead he moves to Dallas to set up a branch of the family’s appliance-repair business there. The most genuinely conflicted character in the piece is Rena’s brother Mark (Jonathan Whitesell), who begins as a hard-core adherent, gradually has his doubts over whether murder really is part of God’s divine plan, flees with Rena to Houston and ultimately is murdered, along with Ed, by a LeBaron goon squad in what became known as the “4 p.m. murders” because they took place at the same time on the same date but in different locations. (Both Mark and Ed were lured away by phony calls for appliance repairs in a device that will be familiar to anyone who’s read The Maltese Falcon.) After that Rena is understandably so afraid that when some kids set off noisemakers one night, she freaks out and thinks it’s a LeBaron hit squad coming to get them all. Ultimately Rena is finally able to find a modicum of happiness with John, a divorcé and just about the first man she’s met who wasn’t part of Ervil’s cult. They get married (significantly without doing the so-called “paternalist grip” that had been part of the cult’s marriage ceremonies), blend their families, and appear headed for happily-ever-afterdom despite still needing to be on guard against another sick retribution attempt by one of the remaining sickos in Ervil’s old cult.

Just how Rena ended up being interviewed by that reporter (a heavy-set woman with black butch-cut hair) is left a mystery, as is how Rena became a blonde when her hair as a younger woman was dark brown, but in real life Rena wrote a memoir in 1990 called The Blood Covenant in which she confessed to Allred’s murder even though she’d been acquitted of it and therefore couldn’t be tried again. The Ervil LeBaron story had also been dramatized by Lifetime in 2013 in the similarly titled Escape from Polygamy (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/08/escape-from-polygamy-indy.html), made by Indy Entertainment, which renamed LeBaron “Ervil Barlow” and in which he was played by William Mapother, Tom Cruise’s cousin. (“Mapother” is the family’s original last name.) Escape from Polygamy was directed by Rachel Goldenberg from a script by Damon Hill, and was originally shot as Ryder and Julina – an obvious pun on Romeo and Juliet – with Ryder (Jack Falahee) Barlow’s son and heir and Julina (Haley Lu Richardson) a young woman whose interest in Ryder is reciprocated even though Barlow has decided to marry her himself. I praised that film at least partly because William Mapother and Jack Falahee looked enough alike they were believable as father and son (a pet peeve of mine when I see actors who look nothing like each other and the script tells us they’re biological relatives). There was one remarkable scene in The Thirteenth Wife that had an unexpected effect on me. The reporter asks Rena why she didn’t just leave the cult, and Rena’s non-answer makes it clear that both tradition and fear made it an unthinkable option.

It then occurred to me that the entire population of the United States of America is now living under a quasi-religious cult with Donald Trump as its Prophet, ruling his people with an iron fist and a clear understanding of just what they will and won’t be allowed to do or even think. Trump has generally been compared by his critics to previous dictators like Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, but the sheer adoration with which his supporters shower him (and his ceaseless demands for even more fulsome praise) makes him seem more like a cult leader than a politician, even an authoritarian one. Trump’s boasts that the entire world is coming to Washington, D.C. to “kiss my ass” (the word he actually used at a Republican Congressional fundraiser) and the extent to which he divides the world into the Saved and the Damned (as well as casting out the people he believes have crossed him and abruptly moving them from the Saved to the Damned) are the stuff of a cult leader, not a Right-wing political figure rationally pursuing an inhumane agenda. There’s even been an article on the Politico.com Web site, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/30/trump-god-messiah-assassination-attempt-00362322, that argues that since the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, Trump has literally believed himself to be God’s anointed agent on Earth. In speeches since then Trump has said things like, “It’s … an act of God. … God spared my life for a reason. … I was saved by God to make America great again.”