Brenda Lafferty and Allen Lafferty

Brenda Lafferty and Allen Lafferty’s marriage moves from a courtship that seemed to promise a shared religious life into a sustained conflict over work, law, family authority, and the reach of Allen’s brothers. Brenda tried to protect her independence and challenge the brothers’ beliefs while remaining committed to Allen; her hope that she could change his course kept her in a relationship she had come to doubt. The marriage’s tragic end exposes how intimate loyalty and family influence converged around her, even as she resisted both.

Courtship and marriage

Brenda was an ambitious student with a strong record in school and an interest in broadcast journalism. At Brigham Young University, where she studied communications and worked on a television newsmagazine, she met Allen in a young-adult congregation. He was not a student, but began attending the congregation and quickly became close to her. Her sister, Betty Wright McEntire, was away on a mission in Argentina and could tell from Brenda’s weekly letters that this relationship was more serious than her earlier romances.

Allen appeared to Brenda’s family to belong to a prominent, exemplary Latter-day Saint household. He was a returned missionary, well known in Provo, and, in Betty’s recollection, charming. Brenda and Allen were sealed as husband and wife in the Salt Lake Temple on April 22, 1982. Brenda was twenty-one. The early promise of the match, however, sits uneasily beside what her family later learned from her journals: within about two months of the wedding, she had begun to feel that she had made a mistake. Soon she was pregnant with their daughter, Erica, and the consequences of the marriage were no longer confined to the couple.

Work, dependence, and everyday resistance

Allen did not want Brenda to continue her broadcasting career after they married. She set it aside for a lower-profile job at Castleton’s, a store in the Orem Mall, which helped provide insurance and support the household. He also pressed her to give up that work and become a wife who depended on him. Brenda had been offered a position teaching in the communications department at Brigham Young University, but Allen would not let her take it; she became a housewife instead. The conflict was not simply about a particular job: it placed her ambitions and ability to support herself against the domestic role Allen wanted for her.

The couple’s disagreements also concerned everyday observance and dealings with the law. When Brenda was pregnant with Erica, she wanted to eat out, but Allen would not patronize restaurants open on Sunday. He checked each place himself while Brenda and her sister waited in the car; when every restaurant was open, he took them home without a meal. After the marriage, Brenda also learned that Allen’s successful tile business operated in cash and that he avoided ordinary financial and legal records. When he refused to pay taxes, she enlisted her father’s help to prepare the return. When Allen objected to renewing the car registration, she insisted on doing it to avoid a ticket. She continued to meet obligations he wanted to evade, and those disputes became recurring tests of how much room she could claim within the marriage.

The conflict sharpened when Erica became ill and Allen would not allow Brenda to take her to a doctor. Brenda’s resistance to his preferences thus extended beyond her own work and conduct to decisions about their child. In her family’s account, the refusal marked a worsening situation, not an isolated disagreement. Brenda’s efforts to preserve a lawful and caring household repeatedly collided with Allen’s increasingly rigid choices.

Allen’s brothers and the struggle for influence

Allen’s relationship with Brenda was entangled with his ties to his brothers. After Ron Lafferty returned to the Provo area, Bernard Brady introduced Dan Lafferty to Onias, and Dan brought Onias to Ron and several other Lafferty brothers. Ron, Dan, Mark Lafferty, Watson Lafferty, and Tim Lafferty entered Onias’s School of the Prophets. Allen was eager to join, but Brenda refused to let him participate. Her opposition placed her in direct conflict not only with her husband’s wishes but with a wider family religious circle.

Brenda was willing to argue theology with the brothers and knew scripture well enough to challenge their fundamentalist claims. They resented her defiance and the influence they believed she had over Allen. At a family meeting called by Ron while their father was dying, Allen brought Brenda; Ron berated and insulted her, and she left in tears. She did not, however, withdraw from the conflict. Betty remembered Brenda as the educated and confident Lafferty wife, someone who felt responsible for defending other women. Her resistance made her a source of support to Dianna Lafferty, who was struggling with Ron’s increasingly abusive conduct and his talk of plural marriage. Brenda urged Dianna to leave him, for her own sake and her children’s.

This support reveals an important asymmetry in Brenda’s position. She could see that Ron was unlikely to abandon his beliefs and advise another woman to escape, yet she remained convinced that she might turn Allen away from his brothers. Her own judgment about the danger surrounding the family did not translate into an easy decision to leave her husband.

Separation plans and the marriage’s end

Toward the end of the winter of 1984, after Allen had become verbally and physically abusive, Brenda called Betty in the middle of the night and met her at a McDonald’s between Salt Lake and American Fork. She said she intended to leave Allen. She had secretly saved money and planned to move to Montana, find work, and raise Erica on her own. It was a concrete plan for independence, not merely a passing complaint.

Brenda changed her mind after the meeting and returned to Allen. Betty understood that Brenda loved him, did not want to give up on the marriage, and believed she could save him from his brothers. Betty also recalled advising Brenda that a married couple should try to work things out, unaware then of the abuse or Allen’s connection to the School of the Prophets. Brenda had not told her family how serious matters had become. About two months later, she called her mother in a panic and asked whether she could come home. Her parents agreed, but Brenda later said that she and Allen had worked things out, and she did not return to Idaho. The repeated movement toward escape and back toward reconciliation records both her agency and the limits she experienced in acting on it.

Brenda did not know that Ron had written a revelation naming her and her baby as people to be removed. Dan Lafferty and Ron later murdered Brenda and Erica. In Dan’s account, he treated the killing as obedience to divine will, a framing that erased the individual lives and family bonds at stake. The marriage’s end therefore belongs to a larger story of religious authority and family allegiance, but it also remains specific: Brenda had loved Allen, challenged him, tried to protect their child, and repeatedly considered leaving. Her resistance did not prevent the violence that ended her life and Erica’s, while the account of her choices makes clear that she was never simply a passive figure in the family’s conflicts.