I remembered seeing something about Jeffrey Lundgren and Jackson County, MO. I know he was born there but he also returned to Holden, Missouri (where Kathryn Johnson, one of his followers was from) after the murders and some of his followers were extradited to there. Holden, MO is 24 miles south of the Bates City farmhouse. The farm was purchased by Burrell Sr. in 1974 and sold in 1995 to Burrell Jr. so the Mohler family was at that farm all through the years of Jeff Lundgren's cult days:
http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/cults1.html
"In 1987 Jeff settled with his cult in a fifteen-acre farm in rural Ohio. There, according to cult members, they were intending to meet God in the final days of planet Earth. However, God would be angry with the cult, due to "man's sins." Lundgren, a resourceful man, figured that if he sent five of his own, the Avery's (whom he considered the weakest family in the cult), before the "judgement bar," God would take out his anger on them.
The Avery family was thrown in a pit under the barn of the cult's ranch and were shot to death with a Colt 45 which, incidentally, Avery had paid for. After the killing Lundgren and his family fled to what they called "The Wilderness" in Tucker County, West Virginia.
By the fall of 1989 the group relocated to Jackson County, Missouri where things started to really fall apart.
On December 31, 1989, Larry Keith Johnson, (whose wife, Katheryn Renee Jackson was chosen by Lundgren as his "wife.") reported the murders to Larry Scott of ATF-Kansas City. Three days later the first body was uncovered, that of Dennis Leroy Avery. On January 7, 1990, Jeff Lundgren, his son Damon, and wife Alice were arrested in Room #29 of the Santa Fe Motel in National City, California. At the time of their arrest police and ATF agents found an arsenal of weapons tucked in the room with them. His wife and nineteen-year-old son received five consecutive life terms for the doomsday killings of the Avery family. Jeff was sentenced to death. The remaining cult members (except for Larry) were sentenced to various lengths of imprisonment."
From this link:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist2/lundgrn3.htm
"The Averys were killed apparently in an
April 18 ritual sacrifice
designed to "cleanse" the cult and allow it to relocate..."