Brenda and Erica Lafferty murders

The Brenda and Erica Lafferty murders were the culmination of a process in which religious revelation recast a family as an obstacle to divine work and violence as obedience. On July 24, 1984, Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica Lafferty, were killed in American Fork, Utah. Dan Lafferty later said he killed both, while his account placed Ron Lafferty inside the apartment and described Ron's role in the attack on Brenda. Their murders led to a prosecution repeatedly entangled with the question of whether Ron's religious beliefs reflected sincere faith, mental illness, or an effort to evade responsibility.

Revelations and the decision to act

In February and March, Ron received about twenty revelations after Onias instructed him to do so. He sometimes typed them onto Bernard Brady's computer as they came to him; more often, he kept them in mind before writing them down. The most disturbing came in late March, handwritten on yellow legal paper. It ordered the removal of Brenda and her baby first, followed by Chloe Low and Richard Stowe, and demanded that the acts occur in rapid succession. It also described the intended violence as an example to others and referred to a person named Todd as an instrument for carrying out the work.

Ron showed the revelation to Dan before presenting it to the School of the Prophets. Dan recognized its disturbing implications, but counselled Ron to establish that it came from God rather than refuse a genuine command. A separate revelation addressed to Dan compared him to Nephi and promised blessings for obedience. According to Mark Lafferty, this praise made Dan willing to do whatever he believed God commanded.

The brothers prayed and concluded that the named targets must be wicked. Within their stark division of the world into good and evil, they classified the targets as children of perdition and decided it would be wise to act on the revelation. The language of removal helped transform murder into a supposed religious duty: the victims were recast as impediments, while responsibility was assigned to divine instruction.

The revelation did not receive the group's usual evaluation. On March 22, before a meeting at Claudine Lafferty's home, Ron handed it to Brady in a side room. Brady was shaken by what he read and told Ron he wanted no part in it and believed it was wrong. Neither man raised it with the other members when the meeting began. Ron and Dan were absent from the next meeting, on March 29. At that gathering, Watson Lafferty brought a pearl-handled straight razor and asked the group to dedicate it as a religious instrument for destroying the wicked. The episode shows how a proposed act of violence entered the group's religious vocabulary even as a member who had read the written order rejected it.

The killings

Dan later described forcing his way into the apartment. He recalled that Brenda apologized for matters including her influence on Ron's wife, and that he then restrained her. Outside, Chip Carnes and Ricky Knapp waited in an Impala with Ron. As the sounds from inside worried them, Knapp suggested that Ron go to help. Dan's later account placed Ron in the apartment during the killings.

Dan said that, after restraining Brenda, he went through the apartment looking for the baby's room because he did not know its layout. He found Erica standing in her crib, closed the door, and spoke to her before killing her. He said he did not see or hear what happened, and later expressed uncertainty about what Erica experienced. This account was delivered years afterward, in a calm and matter-of-fact manner; it does not lessen the fact that Erica, still an infant, was killed along with her mother.

For a long time, both brothers refused to confess. Dan's later account changed the public and legal understanding of Ron's part in the crime. Dan maintained that Ron had not wielded the murder weapon, but said Ron was present and had beaten Brenda despite her pleas. The account, which the book describes as broadly credible to those who heard it, made it difficult for Ron to maintain the position he had taken at his first trial: that he knew nothing about the murders. Dan's account implicated both brothers, even while distinguishing between their actions.

Prosecution and the question of competence

After their arrests, Dan and Ron were evasive when questioned, and neither confessed through their 1985 convictions. Dan's outlook later changed: he accepted that he would spend his life in prison and understood his imprisonment as part of God's plan. By the mid-1990s, he was willing to describe what had happened on July 24, 1984, in detail.

Ron, meanwhile, was found incompetent and transferred from death row to the Utah State Hospital. After sixteen months of psychotherapy and treatment with antidepressant and antipsychotic medication, a new competency hearing was held in February 1994. The prosecution's experts persuaded Judge Steven Hansen that Ron was sufficiently competent to stand trial again. As the March 1996 retrial approached, Ron continued to deny that he was crazy, but no longer actively prevented his lawyers from pursuing an insanity defense.

That defense placed the religious basis of the killings at the center of the case. The jury had to consider whether Ron sincerely believed God had commanded the removal of Brenda and Erica, and whether the extremity of that belief was evidence of a diseased mind. The issue reached beyond one defendant: if obedience to a perceived divine voice could establish insanity, how could a society that protects religious freedom distinguish acceptable belief from delusion? The trial made that difficulty part of the murder case rather than a question external to it.

Verdict and continuing dispute

After four weeks of testimony and five hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Ron of first-degree murder and related charges on April 10, 1996, repeating the outcome of his first trial. The verdict meant that jurors accepted the state's position that Ron was aware of what he was doing and mentally competent to stand trial. When Hansen called the court to impose sentence on May 31, Ron insulted and challenged the judge rather than offer a conventional statement.

The question of sincerity remained unsettled in public discussion. Utah Assistant Attorney General Michael Wims later characterized Ron as calculating rather than psychotic, and many people suspected that Ron's religious declarations and courtroom outbursts were meant to help him avoid execution. Dan's faith was generally regarded as more sincere, even by people who found his theology horrifying. His beliefs had also changed after imprisonment: he said he had moved away from Mormon Fundamentalism and assembled a new theology from the Old Testament, the New Testament, The Book of Mormon, fundamentalist scripture, and his own interpretations.

Dan later placed the murders within an apocalyptic account of a coming harvest, in which divine agents would remove those judged wicked. He interpreted the killing of Brenda and Erica as a foreshadowing of that future violence and imagined earthly men acting as avenging angels. That retrospective explanation does not alter the victims' identities or the brothers' actions; it shows how Dan continued to frame a specific family murder through a religious story of judgment. The case's lasting significance lies partly in this collision: the language of revelation made violence appear to its perpetrators as duty, while the courts had to judge the deeds without treating every claim of religious certainty as either self-validating faith or automatic proof of insanity.