Erica Lane Lafferty

Erica Lane Lafferty was the infant daughter of Brenda Lafferty and Allen Lafferty. Her brief life is presented through the plans and testimony of others: she was named as a target in Ron Lafferty’s claimed revelation, and she was killed when Ron and Dan Lafferty carried out their attack on her family in Utah’s American Fork. Her death also became evidence in the legal proceedings that eventually returned Ron’s case to trial.

Identity and Threat

Erica appears in the account as Brenda’s baby daughter, not as an actor in the events but as a child placed in danger by the Lafferty brothers’ beliefs and decisions. In an affidavit, Bernard Brady listed Brenda and her baby daughter among ten people he believed were in jeopardy. He attributed the danger to the thoughts and potential actions of Ron Lafferty, Dan Lafferty, Watson Lafferty, and another man. Although Brady’s fear was acute, he did not alert the police; he put the affidavit in a desk drawer so he could later establish that he had anticipated the danger.

Other members of the School of the Prophets likewise failed to warn those named for removal. Dan eventually told his youngest brother, Allen Lafferty, that God had commanded the ritual killing of Brenda and Erica, and that he and Ron intended to carry it out. Allen was shocked and questioned why an innocent child would be included. His response makes explicit what the removal language obscured: Erica was not implicated in any conflict between the men, yet she had been made a target by their asserted religious command.

Death and Accounts of the Attack

On July 24, 1984, Ron and Dan entered Brenda and Allen’s apartment in Utah’s American Fork and killed Brenda and Erica. The accounts differ over Ron’s precise actions and who wielded the knife against Brenda. During the drive away from the apartment, Chip Carnes recalled Ron describing the attack, while Dan later maintained that he, rather than Ron, had killed Brenda. The disagreement does not extend in the same way to Erica: Carnes’s account and Dan’s later version both identify Dan as the one who killed the baby.

The distinction matters to the history of the testimony, but it does not divide responsibility for the attack into a simple question of whose hand held the weapon. Dan’s account placed Ron inside the apartment during the killings; it also described Ron’s violence against Brenda. The book therefore presents the brothers’ acts as a joint assault, even as their later recollections contested the exact division of actions. Erica’s death was part of that shared undertaking.

Legal Aftermath and Significance

Dan’s account became especially consequential at Ron’s 1996 retrial. By then, Dan was willing to speak openly about the killings, and his testimony placed Ron at the scene and described his conduct there. On April 10, 1996, the jury again found Ron guilty of first-degree murder and related charges. The verdict followed an earlier conviction that had been overturned after an appellate court ruled that Ron’s competency had been assessed using a faulty legal standard.

Erica’s place in the narrative is thus defined by a stark contrast: she was named in advance among those threatened, yet the warning remained in a drawer and the intended victims were not alerted. Allen’s question about why an innocent child would be included exposes the human consequence of turning a religious claim into a command to kill. Her death also anchors the later dispute over Ron’s responsibility in concrete acts against specific victims, rather than in an abstract debate about belief or mental competence.