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Jacqueline Tarsa LeBaron, daughter of the late Utah polygamous sect leader Ervil LeBaron, has been captured in Honduras and extradited to the United States after more than 17 years on the run.
LeBaron had been wanted since October 1992, when a federal warrant was issued for her arrest in connection with the 1988 slayings of three adults and an 8-year-old girl in Texas who had broken with the Church of the Lamb of God sect led by her father.
FBI spokeswoman Patricia Villafranca said agents took the 44-year-old into custody late Thursday in Moroceli, El Paraisio, Honduras, after she had been expelled for being in the Latin American country illegally. LeBaron made an initial appearance before a U.S. magistrate judge Friday morning, where she was ordered held in federal custody without bond pending a May 19 hearing to determine if she will remain in custody pending trial.
LeBaron told the court she is a Mexican citizen and complained that she was denied due process when she was removed from Honduras, according to The Associated Press. She appeared without an attorney, but one is expected to be appointed for her by the court.
Villafranca would say only that agents traveled to Honduras "acting on a tip," and that LeBaron's apprehension "was ultimately effected with the assistance of the FBI [legal attache] office in El Salvador, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Interpol and the U.S. Consulate in Honduras."
The Church of the Lamb of God had been led by Ervil LeBaron, who died in Utah State Prison in 1981 after being convicted of ordering the 1977 assassination of a rival polygamous leader in Salt Lake County.
While in prison,Ervil LeBaron wrote the 400-page Book of the New Covenants in which he imposed the death penalty for any sect member who broke sect commandments. The FBI alleges that those writings influenced LeBaron family members to carry out the simultaneous slayings in Houston and Irving, Texas, on June 27, 1988.
Killed in Houston were brothers Mark and Duane Chynoweth; Ed Marston was slain in Irving. Duane Chynoweth's daughter, Jenny, was also killed, apparently to eliminate her as a potential witness.
Eventually, five LeBaron family members were either convicted or entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to prison. The sixth defendant, Jacqueline LeBaron, remained at large until Thursday.
LeBaron faces charges ranging from murder and conspiracy to commit murder to witness tampering, obstruction of religious beliefs and racketeering, the FBI says.
The FBI also said many of Ervil LeBaron's more than 50 children -- fathered with as many as 13 wives -- are believed to still be following their father's teachings.
Ervil LeBaron's older brother, Joel, became leader of the polygamous sect, then based in Salt Lake City and known as the Church of the Firstborn in the Fullness of Times, when his father Alma LeBaron died in 1951. Ervil LeBaron was No. 2 in leadership.
In the early '70s, the two brothers became estranged and Ervil LeBaron launched the Church of the Lamb of God in the San Diego area. Ervil LeBaron was charged with ordering the killing of Joel LeBaron while the older brother was in Mexico.
Ervil LeBaron viewed leaders of other polygamous groups as rivals, and was accused of ordering attempts on their lives as well. However, it was the 1977 assassination of the Utah-based Apostolic United Brethren's Rulon C. Allred, leader of another group of polygamous Mormon fundamentalists, that eventually led to LeBaron's imprisonment.
Mexican police caught up with LeBaron in 1979, and he was returned to the U.S. and convicted of having ordered Allred's death. He was serving a life term when he died in August 1981, apparently of natural causes.