Dan Lafferty and Matilda

Dan Lafferty’s marriage to Matilda Lafferty becomes a domestic test of the patriarchal religious rules Dan adopts from The Peace Maker. What had begun as a happy, hopeful relationship narrows into a household governed by his decisions: Matilda loses ordinary freedoms, the children are separated from school and friends, and Dan claims authority over whether she can remain with them. His proposal to take Matilda’s eldest daughter as a plural wife marks an especially stark extension of those rules into their family. Matilda stays, but her account describes a marriage that has disintegrated into a life she experiences as hellish.

Marriage and household

By the time Dan embraced the principles of The Peace Maker, the household included Matilda, her two daughters from an earlier marriage, and four children she and Dan had together. The book’s religious arguments gave Dan what he understood as authority to reshape family life. His interest was not confined to an abstract debate about the history of Mormon marriage: he began applying the treatise’s strictures inside his own home.

The household’s composition mattered to the conflict. Matilda’s older daughters were part of the family Dan claimed the right to govern, even though they were not his biological children. In July 1983, Matilda and Dan’s fifth child together was born, a son whom Dan delivered at home. The growing family lived under rules that increasingly restricted Matilda’s choices and the children’s contact with the world beyond the household.

Rules and isolation

Dan forbade Matilda to drive, handle money, or speak with anyone outside the family when he was absent. He required her to wear a dress at all times. The children were removed from school and prohibited from playing with their friends, cutting off ordinary sources of independence and companionship. Dan also decided that the family would receive no outside medical care; he treated them himself through prayer, fasting, and herbal remedies. When their son was born, Dan delivered him at home and circumcised him himself.

The family’s increasing self-sufficiency was accompanied by material isolation. They grew much of their own food and recovered the rest from grocery-store dumpsters, including stale bread and overripe produce. Dan shut off the gas and electricity, prohibited publications other than Latter-day Saint books and magazines, and discarded the family’s clocks and watches because he believed time should be kept spiritually. These were not isolated household preferences: together, they made Dan the gatekeeper of information, resources, and daily routine.

Authority and punishment

Dan’s control over Matilda also rested on the threat that she could lose her children. When she disobeyed, he used physical punishment. He sometimes did this in front of his mother, brothers, and children. Afterward, he warned Matilda that continued disobedience could result in her being put out of the marriage without the children. The threat drew on the patriarchal interpretation of The Peace Maker, under which the children were treated as their father’s property.

This claim over children echoes, but is distinct from, a broader pattern described elsewhere in the book. Under United Effort Plan doctrine in Colorado City, wives and children were regarded as belonging to the priesthood, which could reassign them. Dan’s household conflict is not presented as an action by that organization; rather, the comparison makes visible how competing religious authorities could place family members under claims that overrode a wife’s or parent’s independent choice. In Dan’s case, the immediate leverage was his asserted right to keep the children if Matilda left.

The proposed plural marriage

Dan announced that he intended to practice spiritual wifery when the opportunity arose. The first person he proposed taking as a plural wife was Matilda’s eldest daughter, his own stepdaughter. The proposal made the conflict within the marriage inseparable from the family’s structure: the same authority Dan used to discipline Matilda extended to decisions about her daughter and the future relationships within the household.

The book connects Dan’s receptiveness to The Peace Maker with his conviction that Joseph Smith had written it. Dan had studied the text and prayed over its authorship; although he did not claim absolute certainty, he believed Joseph Smith was probably its author. That belief helped make its patriarchal prescriptions persuasive to him. He treated the text not merely as historical material but as guidance he could put into effect in the present, with Matilda and her children bearing the consequences.

Matilda’s choice and the marriage’s decline

Matilda later described her decision as a choice between leaving and losing her children or staying and accepting the situation. She stayed. Her account distinguishes that decision from consent to the restrictions: she felt she had no real options, while the threat concerning the children shaped what leaving would cost. The marriage, she recalled, had been extremely happy and hopeful in its first years, but then gradually disintegrated. By the time she described it, she said she had wished for Dan to die so she could escape and characterized her life as hellish.

The relationship’s significance lies in the distance between the marriage’s hopeful beginnings and the authority Dan came to exercise within it. His household rules, punishment, and proposed plural marriage were related expressions of the same hierarchy: Dan interpreted religious doctrine as permission to govern Matilda and the children, while Matilda’s ability to leave was constrained by the prospect of separation from them. Her account records not a resolution of that conflict but the narrowing of her choices under it.