American Fork murders

The American Fork murders were the killings of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, on July 24, 1984. Dan and Ron Lafferty treated the deaths as obedience to a purported command from God. Dan later said he had killed both victims, while describing Ron’s presence and violence as evidence of their shared responsibility. The case joined a family crime to a religious claim—and made the question of how courts should judge violence justified as revelation central to its aftermath.

Warnings and the claimed command

Before the killings, Bernard Brady believed that the lives of ten people, including Brenda and her baby daughter, were in danger because of the beliefs and potential actions of Ron and Dan Lafferty and two other men. His concern was grave enough that he wrote an affidavit identifying those at risk. He did not, however, take it to the police. He put it in a desk drawer, intending it as protection for himself if Ron acted. Other members of the School of the Prophets who were alarmed by the removal revelation also failed to warn those named as targets.

Dan did tell his youngest brother, Allen, that he believed God had commanded the ritual killing of Brenda and Erica and that he and Ron intended to carry it out. Allen was shocked and challenged the inclusion of the infant. The warning therefore reached a family member, but the people identified for removal were not alerted by the school’s members. The gap between recognizing danger and taking action forms part of the event’s immediate background.

The killings and Dan’s later account

Dan and Ron killed Brenda and Erica in American Fork. For years after their arrests, both brothers refused to confess or speak openly about what had happened. By the mid-1990s, Dan’s position had changed: accepting that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, he came to regard his imprisonment as part of God’s plan and became willing to describe the killings.

Dan’s later account, which the book describes as broadly credible to those who heard it, was that he had killed both Brenda and Erica. He maintained that Ron had not wielded the murder weapon, but placed him inside the apartment when the killings occurred and said Ron had beaten Brenda. That account contradicted Ron’s earlier claim that he knew nothing about the murders and presented both brothers as culpable, regardless of which one had physically killed the victims.

Conviction and the contested retrial

Ron was convicted in 1985, but the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated those convictions in 1991. The court agreed that Ron understood the charges and their possible consequences, yet found that his paranoid delusional system prevented him from interpreting them realistically. His belief that divine law exempted him from human law raised a question about whether he had been competent to stand trial under the legal standard used by the state. The ruling required a new competency determination and, if he were found competent, a new trial; it did not resolve his guilt.

After sixteen months of psychotherapy and treatment that included antidepressant and antipsychotic medication, Ron was found competent to be tried again in February 1994. The retrial was scheduled for March 1996. By then, Dan’s account had altered the evidentiary situation: a jury would hear that Ron was present and had participated in the violence, making it harder for him to maintain that he had known nothing of the murders. Ron’s lawyers planned to rely on an insanity defense, a strategy he had forbidden during his first trial. His insistence that his beliefs were not madness remained at the center of the coming proceedings.

Religious meaning and the case’s record

Dan later interpreted the killings through his apocalyptic beliefs. He saw himself as Elijah, charged with preparing the righteous for Christ’s return, and understood the promised Great and Dreadful Day as a time when those outside God’s kingdom would be killed. In that framework, the victims’ deaths became, in Dan’s telling, a foreshadowing of the coming judgment. He also recast the scriptural angels who carry out that judgment as human agents doing God’s work, connecting his own actions to the avenging angels associated with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. This was Dan’s religious interpretation of the crime, not an account that made the killings less violent or their victims less real.

The book’s account of the murders and the brothers’ convictions draws primarily on interviews and correspondence with Dan Lafferty and trial transcripts, with contemporary newspaper reporting also contributing. Dan’s later testimony supplied details that the brothers had withheld after their arrests, while Ron’s competency litigation turned their claims of divine authority into a question for the courts: where sincerely held religious belief ends and legally disqualifying delusion begins. The murders thus remain both a specific act against Brenda and Erica and the center of a broader conflict over responsibility, religious justification, and the limits of legal protection.