Highland, Utah

Highland, Utah, enters the account as a small northern Utah County town whose local life is closely tied to Ron Lafferty’s changing public identity. He served on the first City Council after the town incorporated in 1977, and successfully led a campaign to prohibit beer sales at its only grocery store. The same store remained a point of reference for the town’s rules: travelers heading to American Fork Canyon could not buy beer there. Highland is therefore more than a place-name in the account. It is where Lafferty’s civic involvement, household life, and later criminal case become visible against the routines of a small community.

Civic Life and Local Reputation

Lafferty’s council service placed him inside the town’s newly formed civic structure. His campaign over beer sales linked local government to a particular moral outlook: a dispute about what could be sold in one grocery store became a public measure of the standards he wished Highland to uphold. The account records this action before describing the more radical changes in his views, establishing a progression from conventional political activity to a more uncompromising position.

The neighborhood associated with Lafferty was described as an acre-lot subdivision, with children, horses, goats, chickens, and substantial gardens. He had lived there while raising a family and keeping a cow. Neighbors recalled him as clean-cut and outwardly conventional. That setting lends weight to the contrast the reporting draws: the man who later became known as an excommunicated fundamentalist had also been a familiar resident and local officeholder, not an outsider arriving in Highland from elsewhere.

A Household and Beliefs in Transition

During twelve years in Highland, Lafferty’s political commitments reportedly shifted from conservative Republicanism toward strict constitutionalism and religious fundamentalism. He came to advocate a return to the gold standard, adherence to the Constitution, and obedience only to laws he considered righteous. A longtime friend described his desire to preserve the Constitution and the country as becoming a religious obsession. The report presents these developments as a change in both politics and religious outlook, while leaving open whether the beliefs had changed outright or evolved from earlier convictions.

The change coincided with a rupture in his family life. Lafferty and his wife, Dianna Lafferty, divorced after several years of marriage; neighbors attributed the separation to differences about religion and politics. Shortly after Christmas, she took the couple’s six children out of state. By the time the account was written, Lafferty had not been seen in the neighborhood for a year. These details mark a departure from the earlier domestic image of a resident tending a family cow in a neighborhood of gardens and livestock. They also show how an ideological conflict was experienced locally: through a divorce, the children’s departure, and a once-familiar neighbor’s absence.

Highland in the Murder Investigation

Highland became a focus of the investigation after Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter were killed on July 24. Ron Lafferty, then forty-two and living in Highland, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Dan Lafferty and Richard Knapp were also charged in connection with the killings. Police said they believed the crimes might have followed a handwritten religious revelation attributed to Ron, and asked for information about the document. The report thus connected the town to an investigation in which the possible religious rationale was itself a central question, while treating the alleged revelation as an investigative claim rather than an established account of motive.

The scale of this change is sharpened by the distance between civic and criminal roles. Lafferty had once held a seat on Highland’s first council and pressed for a local prohibition; he was now a murder suspect whom police considered dangerous. The account does not suggest that his earlier council service caused the later crimes. Rather, it places the episodes in the same local biography, showing how a man once known through civic action became known through a case that brought investigators to his relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Chloe Low’s Home and the July 24 Plan

The crime’s reach extended to the home of Chloe Low, on an unpaved, out-of-the-way street in Highland. After killing Brenda and her child, Ron drove Dan, Chip Carnes, and Ricky Knapp there. Their stated plan was to kill Low and then go to the nearby residence of Richard Stowe, president of the Highland LDS Stake. The planned killings were linked in Ron’s revelation to a future City of Refuge near the Dream Mine, but the immediate events in Highland took a different course because the Low family was away at its summer home on Bear Lake for Pioneer Day.

Ron parked his Impala station wagon out of sight on a side street, and he and Dan approached the house to check whether anyone was inside. Finding it empty, they returned to the car and decided to enter in search of weapons, money, or other valuables. Ron knew the Low home well, having been a guest there many times over the preceding dozen years. He, Dan, and Knapp removed a window, disabled the alarm, and searched the house while Carnes kept watch outside. When two neighborhood boys arrived on an all-terrain vehicle and repeatedly knocked at the door, those inside continued searching; the boys eventually left.

The group took a hundred-dollar bill, a watch, car keys, and jewelry. Ron also destroyed Low’s collection of porcelain figurines from Dresden, which he knew she valued for sentimental reasons. They left through a rear window, picked up Carnes, and drove away. The episode makes Highland’s domestic geography consequential: a familiar house on a quiet street became both a planned target and the site of a burglary after its occupants happened to be absent. The town’s civic and residential settings, introduced through ordinary institutions and household routines, frame the widening consequences of the crimes without making the community itself responsible for them.