Lafferty Removal Revelation

The Lafferty Removal Revelation was a handwritten document in which Ron Lafferty claimed that God commanded the killing of four people who stood in the way of his religious work. It gave the intended violence the form of a religious duty: named targets became obstacles to divine purposes, and a sequence of killings was presented as necessary action. Ron and Dan Lafferty accepted that interpretation; most members of the School of the Prophets rejected it. The revelation’s significance lies not only in its threat, but in the way its language and the group’s decisions converted a disputed claim of divine authority into a plan that endangered specific people.

Creation and Contents

Ron received approximately twenty revelations during February and March, after instruction from Onias. He sometimes recorded them as they came to him, using Bernard Brady’s computer; at other times he held them in his memory before writing them down. The most alarming was recorded by hand on a sheet of yellow legal paper in late March. It named Brenda Lafferty and her baby, Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe, and directed that they be removed in rapid succession. It also called for an example to be made of them, presenting their opposition to the Saints as a reason for their deaths.

The text linked its command to the continuation of God’s work and promised that a way would be prepared for an instrument to be delivered, with instructions given to a servant named Todd. It compared Todd to Porter Rockwell, a figure associated with Joseph Smith. The revelation therefore did more than identify victims: it imagined a broader chain of authorization and action, assigning a role to someone beyond the two brothers. The language made the proposed violence sound purposeful and orderly, while describing the people targeted in terms of their supposed obstruction rather than as individuals with claims to protection.

Interpretation by Ron and Dan

Before presenting the document to the school, Ron showed it to Dan. Dan later recalled that Ron appeared frightened by what he had received. Dan urged him to make sure the command came from God, while also warning that refusing divine work could itself be offensive to God. His response registered doubt, but left open the possibility that the revelation might be binding. The question was not simply whether to obey; it was how to distinguish a genuine command from a false one when the claimed command demanded violence.

In the days that followed, the brothers considered the revelation intensely. Ron then received another message assigning them complementary religious roles: he was described as God’s mouth and Dan as God’s arm. They understood this division to mean that Dan would carry out the killings. To interpret the command, they turned to an episode in The Book of Mormon in which Nephi is instructed to kill Laban. The scriptural example supplied a precedent for overcoming resistance to a violent command, and a further revelation compared Dan to Nephi and praised his obedience. Mark Lafferty later said that this assurance made Dan willing to do whatever the Lord commanded.

Ron and Dan also classified the four targets as wicked and as children of perdition, concluding that they deserved to die. That conclusion treated their guilt as already settled: the brothers’ interpretation of the revelation established both the targets’ status and the supposed legitimacy of the sentence. In this way, the document’s religious vocabulary worked together with a rigid division between good and evil. The brothers could regard killing not as a choice requiring independent moral scrutiny, but as an act required by God and directed against people they had already placed outside the righteous community.

Rejection and Unheeded Warning

The School of the Prophets had a practice of submitting revelations to its members for evaluation. On March 22, before a weekly meeting at Claudine Lafferty’s home, Ron took Brady aside and gave him the text to read. Brady was deeply alarmed and told Ron he considered it wrong, but neither man brought it before the group that evening. On April 5, Ron presented a copy to the nine men attending and asked them to confirm its validity. Ron, Dan, and Watson Lafferty supported it; the other six rejected it emphatically. Ron, Dan, and Watson became angry, walked out, and ended their association with the school.

The disagreement exposed a basic weakness in a community that invited its members to receive revelation. A prophet’s authority could be challenged when another member claimed a direct command from God, and the school had no shared means of resolving that conflict once its participants rejected one another’s judgment. For Ron and Dan, the claimed divine command prevailed over the school’s refusal. The vote therefore stopped the revelation from gaining the group’s approval, but did not persuade the brothers to abandon it.

Brady feared that Ron might act on the command. On April 9 he signed and notarized an affidavit listing ten people whose lives he believed were in danger, including the four named in the revelation, several Lafferty family members, and Brady himself. He identified Ron, Dan, Watson, and Todd, whose last name he did not know, as the people whose beliefs and potential actions concerned him. Yet Brady did not take the affidavit to the police; he put it in a desk drawer at home so that it could establish his own lack of responsibility if a killing occurred. Neither he nor the other school members warned those named as targets. The document thus recorded an unusually explicit apprehension of danger without triggering intervention or protection.

From Command to Action

Later that month, Dan told his youngest brother, Allen Lafferty, that God had commanded the killing of Brenda and Erica Lafferty and that he and Ron intended to carry it out. Allen questioned why Erica, an innocent child, had been included. Ron answered by condemning the child’s imagined future character, extending his judgment of Brenda to her daughter. Allen said he could not accept a revelation he had not received himself and would defend his wife and child, but he did not tell Brenda what his brothers had said. The warning reached a person who might have protected the intended victims, but it did not reach Brenda herself.

During the brothers’ later road trip, the revelation remained their central subject. Ron connected the command to the planned City of Refuge and told Dan that a great slaughter would precede its construction. As the journey stretched from weeks into months, Dan observed Ron becoming more agitated and increasingly focused on when the removals should happen. Ron settled on July 24, 1984. Dan prayed over whether to stay with Ron or separate from him, but believed the answer was to remain. The stated date gave the written command a timetable; the brothers’ continuing discussions made it an active plan rather than a text they had merely considered.

When Brenda and Erica were killed, Ron and Dan regarded the first part of the revelation as fulfilled. They then intended to proceed against Chloe Low and Richard Stowe, in the prescribed sequence and before the day ended. Ron expressed fear that he would not have the strength to kill Low; Dan told him not to worry and undertook to handle it. Their stated intention to continue was interrupted, but the sequence in the revelation had already shaped both the killings and what the brothers planned to do next.

Meaning and Afterlife

The revelation’s euphemism of removal concealed the human meaning of the command by recasting killing as a step in a religious program. Later, Dan folded the deaths of Brenda and Erica into an apocalyptic account of a coming harvest, describing himself as an earthly agent doing divine work. That later interpretation extended the same logic: people could be assigned to the side of evil, and violence against them represented preparation for a sacred future. It did not alter the original document’s concrete content—four named people, a prescribed order, urgency, and a promised example—but showed how the command could be placed within a larger theology.

The revelation also became relevant beyond the school’s internal dispute. After Ron’s conviction, an appellate court overturned the 1985 convictions because the trial court had used a faulty standard in deciding whether he was competent to stand trial. The court considered his belief that he answered to divine rather than human law in assessing the effect of his delusional system on his ability to understand the proceedings realistically. That ruling concerned legal competence, not the truth or religious status of the revelation. The distinction underscores the document’s continuing significance: it was at once a claimed divine instruction, a record of a threatened course of action, and evidence in the difficult effort to understand how religious belief and criminal responsibility intersected.