Messenger of Death 1988

Orville Beecham, Charles Dierkop, and his three wives live a quiet, isolated life on a rural Colorado homestead. One day, two masked men roll up in a truck and wait for the children to disappear inside. In a sudden, brutal act, the killers murder the three mothers and the children, shattering the family’s fragile calm. When the father returns to the scene, he is confronted with a massacre that upends everything he knew about his household and his world.

The investigation lands on the desk of a Denver newspaper reporter named Garret Smith, Charles Bronson, who arrives at the aftermath alongside the chief of police, Chief Barney Doyle, Daniel Benzali. The pair are there to report the tragedy and to begin piecing together what happened, all while the town’s pulse quickens with the political angle of the case. They are also drawn into the circle of a wealthy local figure, Homer Foxx, Laurence Luckinbill, who hosts a fundraising gathering and seems to wield influence that could tilt the political landscape in the city.

As Garret digs deeper, Orville is held in a local jail “for his own protection,” a precaution that keeps him away from the investigation but also fuels speculation about possible involvement by Willis Beecham, Jeff Corey. Willis is an excommunicated fundamentalist Mormon who leads a disciplined, polygamous community. He lives in a fortified compound with his followers and is treated as the sect’s prophet, a figure whose beliefs the town associates with violence and vows of retribution. Willis’s account to the reporter introduces a solemn, doctrinal layer to the killings: he suggests that his own brother, Zenas Beecham, John Ireland, may be the killer, setting up a feud that seems personal as much as it is theological.

The story widens as Garret visits Zenas, who runs a sprawling farm in another corner of the state. Zenas’s land sits on an artesian lake that a powerful corporation, The Colorado Water Company, has long coveted. The corporate interest adds a money-and-power motive to the blood feud, hinting that the violence could be part of a larger scheme. Zenas explains that Willis and he are estranged by a doctrinal dispute, and he paints Willis’s movement as one that could justify violent acts in the name of blood atonement—the idea that certain sins demand a brutal, familial reckoning. The symbol shared by the brothers—a looming avenging angel—appears as a stark emblem of their conflicting beliefs and their sense of righteous vengeance.

As the plot unfolds, the investigation reveals that the murder(s) have a carefully orchestrated backer: The Colorado Water Company has hired an assassin and a junior partner to eliminate threats and to provoke the brothers into a deadly confrontation. The junior assassin is portrayed with the same cold resolve as the senior operative, and Garret finds himself negotiating with the younger killer while trying to expose the corporate hand behind the killings. The senior assassin, in a tense turn, ends up killing his partner, exposing the higher-level patronage behind the feud.

The trail finally points to Foxx, the businessman who sought to influence local politics by any means necessary. At a fundraising party for Chief Doyle, the assassin attempts a dramatic strike against Garret, seeking to silence the truth. The tension peaks as the hired gun is pressed to reveal the mastermind behind the violence, and the truth finally comes to light: Foxx stands at the center of the murders, using political ambition to mask a deeper, mercenary motive. In a final, fatal act, Foxx takes his own life after a desperate choice to avoid accountability.

Throughout, the film threads together themes of family, faith, and power, showing how a feud between two brothers can be manipulated by money and corporate interests to unleash violence on innocent people. The intertwining of religious doctrine and corporate ambition creates a web that Garret, the reporters, and the town itself must untangle, even as the avenging angel motif lingers as a chilling reminder of the consequences of vengeance.