Lafferty murders

The Lafferty murders were the July 24, 1984, killings of Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter, Erica, in their American Fork home. Dan Lafferty and Ron Lafferty acted within a religious framework shaped by Ron’s claimed revelation and their conviction that the victims had become enemies of God’s work. The crime transformed a family dispute into a public case about how prophetic authority, absolute moral categories, and claims of divine command could be used to justify violence.

Revelation and the decision to act

In late March, Ron recorded a revelation on yellow legal paper that identified his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and her baby as the first people to be “removed.” It then named Chloe Low and Richard Stowe, called for the removals to occur in rapid succession, and described the killings as an example to others who opposed the true Saints. The wording presented violence as a divine instruction rather than a crime, and placed it within a larger plan for advancing God’s work.

Before sharing the revelation with the School of the Prophets, Ron showed it to Dan. Dan later recalled that Ron was frightened by what he had received; he urged his brother to make certain it came from God, while warning against refusing God’s work if the command was genuine. This response exposed the trap within their reasoning: caution was acknowledged, but obedience remained the feared alternative to disobedience.

The school’s usual procedure was to submit revelations to its members for evaluation. On March 22, Ron gave the document to Bernard Brady, who read it privately and rejected it as wrong and frightening. Neither man raised the revelation when the meeting began, however, so the group did not discuss it. The brothers instead prayed and concluded that the named people must be wicked, in Dan’s terminology “children of perdition.” Once they accepted the revelation as valid, they reasoned that acting on it was the wise course. A subsequent revelation to Dan compared him to the Book of Mormon figure Nephi and praised his obedience; Mark Lafferty later said that this affirmation left Dan willing to do whatever the Lord commanded.

The killings in American Fork

On July 24, shortly after noon, Dan and Ron drove to the apartment of their youngest brother, Allen, with Ricky Knapp and Chip Carnes, two men who had been traveling with them. Dan entered the duplex. Brenda was there with Erica, who was fifteen months old. Dan later described carrying out the killings as obedience to the revelation; Ron, Knapp, and Carnes had been waiting outside in the car, and Ron came to the door after the activity inside drew attention. Brenda and Erica were killed in the apartment.

That morning, Allen had left before sunrise for construction work east of Ogden, about eighty miles away. During his lunch break he phoned Brenda, who spoke with him and then put Erica on the line; after the baby’s brief sounds, Brenda reassured Allen that all was well. The ordinary call became the last time he spoke to his wife and daughter before discovering them.

Allen returned at about eight that evening. The apartment door was locked, unlike the couple’s usual practice, and a baseball game was playing on a television neither he nor Brenda normally watched. Finding the home unnaturally quiet, he initially thought Brenda might have taken Erica to a neighbor’s. Then he noticed blood near the entrance and found Brenda on the kitchen floor. When he tried to call for help, he discovered that the kitchen phone had been disconnected; the bedroom phone was also unusable. He went to a neighbor’s apartment to reach emergency services and called his mother. As he waited for police, he saw the blood elsewhere in the apartment and recognized the signs of a struggle. He already believed he knew who was responsible.

Investigation and public response

Police took Allen to the American Fork station and questioned him through the night, initially treating the husband as the prime suspect. He persuaded investigators to look instead at Ron, the oldest of Allen’s brothers, who had recently returned to Utah County after spending much of the previous three months traveling in the West with Dan. Police circulated a description of Ron’s pale-green 1974 Impala station wagon, registered in Utah.

The apparent ritual character of the killings brought unusual news attention and unsettled the public. Early reporting described the case as possibly connected to a religious revelation. Ron had been charged with two counts of first-degree murder on Wednesday; on Friday, Dan and Knapp were also charged with first-degree murder. The report identified Dan as Brenda’s brother-in-law and a former candidate for Utah County sheriff, and Knapp as a twenty-four-year-old formerly of Wichita. The charges widened the case from suspicion of one brother to an alleged group action involving the travelers who had accompanied him.

Denial, responsibility, and religious meaning

Dan maintained for years that he was innocent, including after his conviction, while also not denying that he had killed Brenda and Erica. He resolved that contradiction by distinguishing human law from what he believed was God’s will: in his account, obedience to God could not constitute a crime. He said that he felt no regret or shame for the killings. The distinction did not deny his actions; it recast responsibility as a form of religious service and placed the moral authority for the act elsewhere.

Later, Dan connected the murders to an apocalyptic account of a future harvest, when Christ’s angels would separate the wicked from the righteous. He interpreted the angels not as heavenly beings but as people on earth carrying out divine work, and described the deaths of Brenda and Erica as a foreshadowing of that future violence. In this interpretation, the revelation’s language of removal and the brothers’ division of people into the wicked and the chosen were not incidental beliefs surrounding the crime. They supplied its vocabulary, its claimed authority, and a rationale that Dan continued to defend long afterward.