Brenda and Erica Lafferty murder case

The Brenda and Erica Lafferty murder case centers on the July 24, 1984, killings of Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter, Erica, in their American Fork home. The crime transformed a family already known in Utah County into the focus of a statewide search and a dispute over religious authority, responsibility, and mental competence. The book traces the killings not only through the brothers’ actions, but also through the revelation that preceded them, the warnings that were not passed to police or the intended victims, and the later legal challenge to Ron Lafferty’s conviction.

Family, revelation, and intended targets

Before the killings, the Lafferty family had been admired for its industriousness and devotion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Watson Lafferty and Claudine Lafferty raised eight children in Provo, including Allen Lafferty, the youngest, and his older brothers Ron Lafferty and Dan Lafferty. Brenda Lafferty, Allen’s wife, had been a local television presenter before leaving broadcasting to raise a family. Their daughter Erica was fifteen months old.

The book connects the crime to a revelation Ron received while involved with the School of the Prophets. In late March, he wrote that Brenda and her baby should be removed, followed in rapid succession by Chloe Low and Richard Stowe. The revelation presented the killings as necessary to advance divine work and identified a person called Todd as an instrument. Ron showed the document to Dan Lafferty before sharing it with the group. Dan cautioned that its source should be tested, but also warned against refusing a genuine divine command. That response mattered: uncertainty did not become a reason to stop. The brothers later concluded that the people named in the revelation must be wicked and that they should act on it.

The revelation was not simply a private conviction. Members of the school had a practice of evaluating revelations, and Bernard Brady was alarmed when Ron showed him the document. Brady said nothing about it at the group meeting and did not alert police. He instead put an affidavit in a desk drawer, listing people he feared were in danger and the men he believed posed the threat. Other members also failed to warn the people named. Later that month, Dan told Allen that God had commanded the deaths of Brenda and Erica and that he and Ron intended to carry out the command. Allen questioned why an innocent child would be included. The warning reached a family member, but it did not bring intervention in time.

July 24 in American Fork

That morning, Allen left the couple’s duplex before sunrise and drove about eighty miles to a construction job east of Ogden. During lunch, he spoke by phone with Brenda, who briefly put Erica on the line. Brenda told him all was well. The ordinary reassurance of that call became the last contact described before the killings.

Dan later said that shortly after noon he, Ron, Ricky Knapp, and Chip Carnes drove to Allen’s apartment. He described entering the home and killing Erica, then killing Brenda. His account framed his actions as obedience to Ron’s revelation and to what he believed God required. The book emphasizes the gap between that religious justification and the deaths of two family members who had been designated as targets. Dan continued to deny that he had committed a crime, reasoning that an act he believed to be God’s will could not be criminal; he also maintained that he felt no regret for the killings.

Allen returned at about eight that evening. The front door was locked, unlike the couple’s usual practice, and a baseball game was playing on the television, though neither of them watched baseball. After switching it off, he noticed blood near the entrance and found Brenda in the kitchen. The kitchen phone had been disconnected; the bedroom phone was also unusable, so he went to a neighbor’s apartment to call for help. When Allen returned, he prayed beside Brenda and then saw that blood marked more than the kitchen: it was also on the living-room walls, floor, doors, and curtains. He recognized who he believed was responsible before police had identified a suspect publicly.

Police initially questioned Allen through the night, following the common suspicion that a husband had killed his wife. He persuaded them that Ron, the oldest of his brothers, was the prime suspect. Ron had recently returned to Utah County after traveling in the West with Dan. The next day, news reports identified Ron as a former Highland city councilman charged with the deaths. Police soon charged Dan and Ricky Knapp as well. Authorities said the killings might have been connected to a religious revelation, while publicly declining at first to establish a motive or confirm rumors about the brothers’ religious affiliations.

Warnings, belief, and responsibility

The sequence of warnings complicates any account that treats the murders as the unanticipated act of one man. Bernard Brady had read the removal revelation and feared its consequences, but kept his affidavit at home rather than contacting law enforcement. The other members of the School of the Prophets did not warn the designated targets. Dan’s later warning to Allen made the threat more explicit, yet Allen’s alarm could not prevent the killings. The failure was therefore not a lack of any forewarning: people outside the intended victims’ household had encountered the danger, but the information was not carried to those who might act on it.

The book also examines the moral logic through which the brothers made the revelation actionable. Their worldview sorted people into opposing categories of good and evil. By deciding that the named targets belonged to the wicked, Ron and Dan recast murder as a religious duty and shifted responsibility from themselves to divine command. Dan’s own account preserves the contradiction at the heart of that reasoning: he did not deny that he had killed Brenda and Erica, yet he insisted that obedience to God meant he had committed no crime. The religious language supplied a rationale for violence; it did not alter who died or who had chosen to act.

Conviction, appeal, and the case’s wider reach

Ron was convicted in 1985. His new attorneys appealed to the U.S. District Court and the Utah Supreme Court, without success, before the case reached the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1991, that court vacated the convictions because the state trial court had used an improper standard to decide whether Ron was competent to stand trial. The judges accepted that he understood the charges and their possible consequences, but concluded that his delusional system prevented him from interpreting those consequences realistically. Their decision did not declare him innocent; it meant that any renewed prosecution would require a fresh trial after his competence was reassessed under accepted legal standards. The ruling also raised a broader question for Utah officials about how courts should handle violent acts justified by religious belief.

Elsewhere, the book’s account of Ruby Jessop’s disappearance develops a related concern about whose warnings and testimony receive an effective response. Flora Jessop reported that her sister had been taken, but a deputy accepted church leaders’ explanation that Ruby was away on vacation and left. When Ruby later met a social worker in St. George, she was interviewed in the presence of a person alleged to have abducted her and was returned to members of the faith. Activist Lorna Craig contrasted that response with the extensive effort devoted to Elizabeth Smart’s rescue and to prosecuting her abductors. The episodes are not the same case, but their placement alongside the Lafferty murders broadens the book’s attention from individual acts of violence to the institutions and communities that receive, discount, or fail to transmit warnings. In the Lafferty case, the revelation was known to several people before the killings; after the event, the legal system confronted a different question: how to judge an accused man whose religious convictions shaped his understanding of criminal responsibility.