Chloe Low

Chloe Low’s place in the Lafferty story turns on a relationship that changed from friendship into perceived opposition. A close friend to both Ron and Dianna Lafferty for twelve years, she supported Dianna as the marriage deteriorated and helped her leave. Ron came to regard that support as a threat: he included Chloe in a revelation commanding that she be removed. On July 24, 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty went to her home in Highland, Utah, intending to act on it. The Lows were away, and the intended attack became a burglary. Chloe was not there, but the men’s entry into her home and destruction of an object they knew she cherished made her friendship, in Ron’s view, part of the conflict he sought to resolve by violence.

Identity and Background

Chloe was married to Stewart Low, who served as bishop of Ron and Dianna’s LDS ward. Through that household and her own friendship with the Laffertys, she was not a distant observer of their marriage: she had known Ron and Dianna closely for a dozen years. She had long admired the Lafferty family, and she also knew Dan as a patient, seeking chiropractic treatment from him when her back troubled her. These connections placed her within the same social and religious circle as the people whose relationship she would later help change.

Her ties to Ron and Dianna were not identical. As their marriage began to fall apart, Chloe continued to support both of them. But when Ron’s behavior grew increasingly monstrous, she took Dianna’s side. Her decision was practical as well as personal: she offered Dianna and the children a place to stay at the Low home on two occasions, first for four days and later for ten. Chloe’s home thus became temporary shelter during a marriage crisis, not merely a setting in which she expressed sympathy.

Support for Dianna

Chloe’s assistance continued after the divorce. She helped Dianna and her children pack up and move to Florida, standing with them as they left the life they had shared with Ron. In Ron’s interpretation, Chloe’s advocacy and material help were decisive: he believed Dianna would not have had the means to leave without her. The account does not present Chloe as the sole cause of the separation; it shows instead how Ron fixed responsibility on a friend whose repeated acts of care helped make Dianna’s departure possible.

That assistance carried a different meaning for the two women. For Dianna, Chloe provided a place to stay and practical help with a move. For Ron, the same acts became evidence that Chloe had helped deprive him of his wife and children. The contrast is central to Chloe’s story: what appears as support and protection in one relationship was recast as hostile interference in another. As Ron’s anger hardened, the ordinary fact of friendship acquired, in his mind, the force of an accusation.

Named in the Revelation

After Dianna left, Ron devoted himself to the School of the Prophets, where he was taught to receive and interpret revelations. In February and March he received about twenty. The most disturbing came in late March, written by hand on yellow legal paper. It instructed that Brenda Lafferty and her baby should be removed first, followed by Chloe and then Richard Stowe, and called for these acts to occur in rapid succession. Chloe was therefore not an incidental name in Ron’s thinking: the revelation placed her in an ordered series of intended killings and presented her removal as part of a divinely commanded undertaking.

Bernard Brady feared that Ron might act on the revelation. On April 9, he signed and notarized an affidavit stating that he believed ten people, including Chloe, were in jeopardy because of the beliefs and potential actions of Ron, Dan, Watson Lafferty, and a man identified only as Todd. The affidavit documented a specific fear, but Brady did not alert the police. He put it in a desk drawer so he could later establish that he had been blameless if Ron killed anyone. Chloe’s danger was thus recognized by someone within the group, yet the warning did not become an intervention that could protect her or the other people named.

The Visit to Her Empty Home

On July 24, 1984, after Brenda and Erica Lafferty had been killed, Ron drove Dan, Chip Carnes, and Ricky Knapp to Chloe’s home in Highland. Their immediate plan was to kill Chloe and then go to the home of Richard Stowe, following the sequence laid out in Ron’s revelation. The Lows had gone to their summer home at Bear Lake for the Pioneer Day holiday. Ron and Dan approached to see who might be inside, found nobody there, and returned to the car. With Chloe absent, Ron changed the immediate plan from killing her to taking property from the house.

Ron knew the home well from many visits over the years. He, Dan, and Knapp entered through a window after disabling the burglar alarm, while Carnes remained outside as a lookout. Two neighborhood boys arrived on an all-terrain vehicle and repeatedly knocked at the front door. The men inside heard them but continued searching the house; the boys eventually left. The episode brought the intended violence into Chloe’s domestic space without bringing Chloe herself into the scene. Her absence prevented the planned encounter from taking place that day, but it did not end the threat that had been directed at her.

The men stole a hundred-dollar bill, a watch, car keys, and jewelry. Ron also destroyed Chloe’s collection of porcelain figurines from Dresden, Germany, which he knew she treasured for sentimental reasons. That deliberate act of spite connected the burglary to the personal grievance behind the plan: her home and possessions were not only targets of theft but also objects through which Ron could express hostility toward her. After leaving the house, the men headed toward Stowe’s residence. A missed turn and growing reluctance interrupted that next intended killing, and they did not return to Chloe’s home.

Narrative Role and Significance

Chloe’s role is defined less by direct confrontation with Ron than by the consequences of her care for Dianna. Her repeated hospitality, emotional support, and help with the move gave Dianna practical support during the separation; Ron transformed those same actions into grounds for blame. That reversal reveals how the brothers’ religiously framed violence could absorb a compassionate act and reinterpret it as opposition to a divine work.

The visit to Chloe’s house also marks a sharp difference between a named target and an actual victim of the violence in that moment. Ron’s revelation specified her place in a sequence, and the brothers arrived intending to carry it out, but her absence at Bear Lake left them to search and steal instead. The porcelain collection, singled out because it mattered to her, makes the intrusion personal even though she was not home. Chloe’s story therefore remains suspended between threatened action and interrupted opportunity: the men left without reaching her, but the plan, the affidavit, and the attack on her home establish how near the danger came.