Brenda Lafferty

Brenda Lafferty, born Brenda Wright, was a confident student and aspiring journalist whose resistance to the Lafferty brothers’ growing fundamentalism placed her in direct conflict with her husband’s family. She supported Dianna Lafferty as Dianna tried to leave Ron Lafferty, and she refused to accept demands that Allen Lafferty submit to his brothers. On July 24, 1984, Brenda and her infant daughter, Erica, were murdered. Her story links the brothers’ religious extremism to the control of women within family life, while the uncertainty over which brother wielded the knife does not diminish the account’s conclusion that both were culpable.

Identity and Background

Brenda was the second oldest of seven children. Born in Logan, Utah, she moved with her family to Ithaca, New York, when she was a year old, while her father pursued a doctorate at Cornell University. After he completed his degree, the family returned west and settled in Twin Falls, Idaho. Brenda’s sister Betty Wright McEntire remembered her as outgoing, energetic, and full of personality; the two were close friends. Brenda was popular at school, participated in student government and the drill team, and excelled academically. In 1980, she placed first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant.

After graduating with honors, Brenda enrolled at the University of Idaho and became president of her sorority. She later left that course of life, returned to Twin Falls, studied for two years at the College of Southern Idaho, and transferred to Brigham Young University. There she majored in communications and anchored a television newsmagazine on KBYU, a local public-broadcasting affiliate. Her ambition was to work in broadcast journalism, and she was offered a teaching position in Brigham Young University’s communications department. These achievements make the limits later placed on her work and independence concrete: she had cultivated a public voice and a professional direction before marriage narrowed both.

Marriage and Constrained Ambitions

Brenda met Allen Lafferty through a young-adult ward in Provo, Utah, where he began attending despite not being a student. Her family described him as charismatic, and Brenda became seriously attached to him. On April 22, 1982, when she was twenty-one, they were married and sealed for time and eternity in the Salt Lake City temple.

Marriage brought a sharp change in the prospects she had been building. Allen did not want Brenda to continue working as a broadcaster. She took a lower-profile job at a store in the Orem Mall to obtain insurance and help support the family, but he then pressured her to leave that job as well, expecting her to depend on him. He also refused to let her accept the teaching position at Brigham Young University. Her journals indicate that within about two months of the marriage she believed she had made a mistake. She later became pregnant with Erica. Brenda’s unrealized career was not simply a matter of postponed ambition: the account shows a partner actively restricting her employment and pushing her toward dependence.

Resistance and Conflict

As Dan Lafferty persuaded his brothers to adopt fundamentalist beliefs, their wives faced demands derived from The Peace Maker. Brenda was the exception among the brothers’ wives: she would not simply acquiesce. She objected to Allen’s demands and urged the other women to defend their rights and think independently. Her education, command of scripture, and confidence enabled her to argue with Ron Lafferty and Dan Lafferty about doctrine rather than accept their claims without challenge.

That resistance also had a practical consequence within the family. When Bernard Brady introduced Dan to Onias, Allen was eager to join Onias’s School of the Prophets, but Brenda refused to let him participate. Standing against Allen meant standing against a wider family network, and the brothers blamed her for keeping Allen apart from them. They resented both her influence over him and her willingness to confront their religious arguments. At a family meeting called by Ron to discuss their dying father’s funeral, Allen brought Brenda with him; Ron’s anger at her presence and his verbal abuse drove her from the meeting in tears. She did not, however, remain intimidated. Her opposition was particularly striking because she was only twenty-three while the people around her treated her as an obstacle to their authority.

Brenda also became an important source of support to Dianna as Ron’s behavior grew more controlling. Dianna sought help from friends and Church leaders, especially Brenda, as Ron spoke more enthusiastically about plural marriage and announced his intention to marry off their teenage daughters as plural wives. Brenda’s advocacy extended beyond disagreement with the brothers: she encouraged the other wives to think for themselves and helped Dianna resist a future she feared. Ron regarded Brenda as instrumental in Dianna’s decision to abandon him, and much of his long-standing anger came to focus on her. The narrative thus connects Brenda’s independence to the brothers’ hostility without treating her resistance as the cause of the violence committed against her.

Separation and Murder

Brenda was afraid of the Lafferty brothers, but fear did not stop her from defending Dianna and the other wives. Toward the end of winter in 1984, after Allen had berated and beaten her, Brenda secretly saved money and told Betty she planned to leave him, move to Montana, find work, and care for Erica herself. She had no knowledge of Ron’s removal revelation. The plan reveals how far the marriage had deteriorated and that Brenda was attempting to create a life outside Allen’s control. The evidence does not establish that she carried out this intended departure before she was killed.

On July 24, 1984, Dan and Ron went to the American Fork home Brenda shared with Allen. Their actions formed part of Ron’s plan to carry out the removal revelation, which also named Erica, Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe. Brenda and Erica were killed in the apartment. Accounts presented later disagree about the exact division of acts between the brothers. Dan’s account placed the knife in his own hand, while Chip Carnes testified that Ron described beating and killing Brenda and said Dan had killed the baby. Dan disputed the rest of Carnes’s account, and the book notes that Carnes had been offered a favorable deal in exchange for evidence useful to the prosecution. It does not resolve every detail of who wielded the knife. It does, however, characterize the murders as a joint effort and Ron and Dan as equally culpable.

After the murders, Ron drove Dan, Carnes, and Ricky Knapp to Chloe’s home in Highland, Utah, intending to carry out the remaining part of the command. Chloe and her family were away at their summer home on Bear Lake for Pioneer Day, so that intended attack did not take place then. The sequence makes clear that Brenda’s killing was not an isolated act detached from the brothers’ plans: she and Erica were among the people named for removal, and the party continued toward another target after leaving the apartment.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

Brenda’s death continued to shape the lives of her family during the drawn-out legal proceedings. More than seventeen years after Ron’s first death sentence, his continuing appeals renewed the strain on Brenda’s parents and siblings. Her mother, LaRae Wright, described the trials as difficult for the family, particularly for Brenda’s father. The family remembered Brenda not only as the victim at the center of the case but as a person whose absence remained immediate: Betty noted that Brenda would have been forty-two and that they still missed her.

After detectives removed Brenda’s possessions from the apartment as evidence, the remaining belongings were placed in storage. When Allen failed to pay the rental fee, Betty and LaRae retrieved them. Brenda’s father later began looking through her journals, scrapbooks, and personal items. Reading the journals led him to dwell on whether he should have recognized the danger and protected his daughter. The books and papers that recorded Brenda’s own life therefore became part of the family’s grief, confronting them with both her ambitions and the limits of what they had known while she was alive.

The book presents Brenda as a counterforce to the brothers’ demand for women’s submission: educated, assertive, and willing to use her voice in defense of herself and others. Her story also resists reducing her to a symbol. The details of her education, her unrealized journalism career, her marriage, and her plans to leave establish a specific life interrupted by violence. The continuing disputes over the brothers’ individual actions complicate the account of the murders, but not the broader pattern the narrative identifies: Brenda’s opposition to their control made her a focus of their resentment, while the consequences of the crime endured long after her death.