On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities—fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century. The massacre produced international headlines for weeks, and prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to send in the US Army.
In The Colony, Sally Denton delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their homestead—Colonia LeBaron—is a portal into the past, a place that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons' internal blood feud in the 1970s and up to the family's recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in Colonia LeBaron.
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Sally Denton is the author of eight books of investigative journalism, including the bestselling American Massacre, The Money and the Power, and The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, among other awards. She has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Woodrow Wilson Public Scholar Fellowship, the Hoover Media Fellowship at Stanford, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Black Mountain Institute Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Grant.
Ann Richardson is an Earphones-winning narrator who studied broadcast journalism and Spanish at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Years later, the desire to take up a creative yet productive career lead her to narrating audiobooks and founding Great Plains Audiobooks, an audiobook publishing company focusing on bringing Midwestern literature to audio.