The Dangers of Missionary Work | Ken Driggs, Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders

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On a quiet Monday evening in 1974, two Mormon missionaries visited a Texas trailer house—oddly situated behind a taxidermy shop—at the invitation of the occupant, Bob Klea son, an inactive member of the church. Instead of a pleasant family home evening, perhaps consisting of dinner and gospel conversation, Kleason shot the two young men at close range and dismembered their bodies with the taxidermist’s bandsaw. His action was not motivated by personal animosity toward the missionaries, Gary Darley from California and Mark Fischer from Milwaukee; rather, he was angry in general at church members for their lack of support during a recent jail term he had received for felony theft. 

The paranoid Kleason was 42 years old at the time of the murders, with a long history of unstable and violent behavior. In spite of earning a college degree in sociology, he had never maintained a job, a marriage, or a stable lifestyle. He had been interested in the LDS church for many years, questioning missionaries near his New York home and even disrupting a Denmark congregation by his at tempts to pass himself off as a member. In 1973, he was finally baptized, although he rarely attended meetings. Within weeks of the event, local leaders were warned by general authorities in Salt Lake City of the deceptive and violent behavior he had exhibited while living among other Mormon congregations. Nevertheless, members and missionaries continued to attempt to “love him into the church” in spite of witnessing his recurring displays of anger. To a former missionary he wrote: “few thought of me when I begged for help, now I listen to no one, I go for the kill. . .1 am going after all my oppressors with vengeance. . .1 have learned to hate . . .1 want BLOOD” (pp. 86-87). Within days of this warning, the two missionaries were dead. 

Ken Driggs, an attorney who specializes in the death penalty, has writ ten a comprehensive account of these tragic murders, including an update on the current and worrisome activities of the murderer. His text is lawyerly, expressing his knowledge and fascination with the legal maneuverings of the case, though his style is plodding and somewhat lifeless. He never pulls the reader into the internal perspective of the perpetrator, or of the victims, as do great true-crime writers like Ann Rule, nor does he illuminate the story with gossipy, personal detail as is done so effectively by Dominick Dunne. Nevertheless, one cannot help but be jolted by the pointless and meaningless infliction of misery revealed in Driggs’s chronicle. 

The reader is provoked to wonder why church members and missionaries continued to visit such an obviously psychotic individual. At Klea son’s trial, a witness was asked that very question: “If Kleason was such a scary guy, why did you keep visiting him?” The witness responded foolishly: “I’m a member of the Mormon church, he is a member, and I was trying to fellowship him along with the missionaries” (p. 148). This example of how readily members accepted the task of fellowshipping dangerous felons creates a picture of Mormons as credulous and easily duped, making the motto “every member a missionary” a bad joke. 

The gullibility of young, unsophisticated and unschooled missionaries, fascinated by guns and romantic adventures, is more easily understood than the absence of responsible leadership in this tragedy. Kleason spun stories portraying himself as a wronged ex-CIA agent, former test pilot, big game hunter and expert gun owner. His thrilling tales of defecting from the CIA due to his dissent about the Vietnam War and then becoming a target for assassination by his ex-employers are guaranteed to enthrall ttwenty-year-oldboys, but they should have been seen as fiction by an older, more skeptical and experienced audience. It is a shame that the settled, adult church members and leaders fell for his act, providing no guidance to the youngsters. 

Of course, Kleason is not the first Mormon to cook up such a dramatic new identity to aggrandize himself among his acquaintances. More than one character in the church has in vented ties to the FBI or the CIA. It is an effective way to fool their LDS peers, since the CIA rarely provides hard evidence to prove or disprove the identities of their undercover operatives. One strange example occurred some years ago in a BYU ward where my husband was presiding as bishop. A young man in the ward used this approach to try to intimidate a young woman out of ending their relationship. Luckily in this case the obvious contradictions in his stories, his notice able lack of funds, and his inordinate amount of free time proved his undoing before anyone was hurt. 

Often, it is the conversion experience that provides a perfect opportunity for the unstable or the devious to create a new and more interesting persona. Pretenders with new names and doctored backgrounds have not been rare in our church; they turn up as fascinating fireside speakers, writers of well-received church books and even as teachers at BYU. If nothing else, this book is a reminder that such self-invention ought not to be easily dismissed. 

A more important moral of this story is that faithful members should not assume that their children are safe from harm simply because they are doing the Lord’s work in serving a mission. Mormons share a common folk belief that the special service of missionaries, accompanied by the many prayers from home on their behalf, provides a shield against danger or accident. Of course, if this were true then we wouldn’t see so many trou bled, sick, or injured missionaries return home. Taking this notion literally encourages missionaries to ignore their own common sense and discount the dangerous situations they might encounter, in spite of plenty of evidence that they are not immune from the evils of the world. Perhaps, instead of prayer, they would be better served by a special MTC training course de scribing how to recognize and avoid the psychopaths, con artists, and worst of all, potential murderers among us. 

Ironically, after the disappearance of the murdered missionaries, the police found their abandoned car, easily identified by its bumper sticker, “Happiness is Family Home Evening.” 

Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders, by Ken Driggs (Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 2000), 210 pp., $19.95 paper.