Dan Lafferty

Dan Lafferty’s story traces the conversion of religious certainty into claimed authority to kill. A committed reader of fundamentalist scripture, he came to treat both household rules and constitutional law as matters governed by his own literal interpretations. In 1984 he and his brother Ron acted on a revelation Ron said came from God: Dan killed Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, while Ron was present and helped carry out the plan. Dan’s later account, after years of evasion, complicated the brothers’ competing claims about who had done what but placed them both inside the crime. In prison, Dan rejected Mormon fundamentalism and developed a new theology centered on his belief that he was Elijah, appointed to prepare the way for Christ’s return.

Religious Study and Family Life

Dan’s turn toward plural marriage was shaped by his study of The Peace Maker, a treatise whose authorship had long been disputed. Joseph Smith appeared on its title page as printer, and its ideas resembled some of his teachings; Dan wanted to know whether Joseph had written it. After studying and praying, Dan became convinced that he had, although he acknowledged that he could not know for certain. The book’s apparent connection to the founding prophet made its teachings especially persuasive to him.

By then, Dan’s household included his wife, Matilda, her two daughters from a previous marriage, and four children they had together. Taking the treatise’s strictures as a practical guide, he announced that he intended to marry Matilda’s older daughter, his stepdaughter. He ultimately abandoned that plan and married Ann Randak, a Romanian immigrant who worked with horses at a ranch up Spanish Fork Canyon. Dan had met Ann after borrowing a horse from her for a local parade. She was not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Dan described her as open to new experiences and said that becoming his plural wife had been her idea. His account presents plural marriage not as an abstract doctrine but as a program he sought to enact within his own family.

Politics and the Authority of Law

Dan’s religious literalism extended beyond marriage into an increasingly adversarial view of government. He led family discussions arguing that the government had exceeded its constitutional authority. Drawing on The Book of Mormon, he opposed requirements such as obtaining licenses, paying taxes, and using a Social Security number. He regarded a license as an agreement that surrendered control of one’s life to government and maintained that people should be able to exercise basic rights without official permission.

In the summer of 1982, Dan made that position public by running for sheriff of Utah County. He spoke at public forums, wrote letters to the Provo newspaper, appeared on radio, and rode in small-town parades. His campaign promised a scrupulously literal enforcement of the United States Constitution, with restoration of the primacy of common-law juries as a central aim. The campaign joined two strands of his outlook: distrust of centralized authority and confidence that his own reading of law and scripture could supply a just alternative. Rather than treating interpretation as a question requiring shared institutions or deliberation, Dan increasingly presented it as a matter of fidelity to fundamental principles.

The Removal Revelation and the Killings

Ron showed Dan the revelation before sharing it with the School of the Prophets. Dan recalled that Ron was frightened by what he had received. He urged his brother to make sure the command came from God, while also warning against refusing God’s work if it truly was commanded. That response contained a reservation, but it did not become a lasting barrier. After praying, the brothers concluded that the four people named for removal were wicked and deserved to die. They accepted the revelation as valid and decided that acting on it was wise.

On July 24, 1984, Dan killed Brenda and Erica in the apartment of Brenda’s husband, Allen Lafferty, in American Fork. The killing of the infant preceded the attack on Brenda; by about two o’clock that afternoon, Dan had completed the first part of the command as he understood it. The brothers then drove with Chip Carnes and Ricky Knapp to Chloe Low’s home in Highland, intending to carry out the next part of the revelation and then go to Richard Stowe’s residence. Stowe was president of the Highland LDS Stake. They connected these planned killings to a larger project: clearing the way for a City of Refuge near the Dream Mine in preparation for the Last Days.

The intended attack on Chloe Low did not take place. Ron parked his Impala station wagon out of sight while he and Dan checked the house; the Lows had left for their summer home at Bear Lake for the Pioneer Day holiday. Ron then proposed taking property from the empty home, including any guns or money they might find. He backed the car into the carport and took a 20-gauge shotgun, while Carnes was told to keep watch. The shift from a claimed divine mission to searching an unoccupied house for valuables sits uneasily beside the brothers’ account of a single sacred purpose. Their planned sequence of killings and the City of Refuge remained unfulfilled.

Flight, Accounts, and Legal Consequences

During the drive away, Knapp asked what had happened at the Laffertys’ apartment. Dan later said that he described the killings in detail and made clear that he, not Ron, had wielded the knife that killed Brenda and Erica. Carnes’s later testimony differed: he attributed the killing of Brenda to Ron and described Dan as the person who killed the baby. Dan accepted the essential claim that he had killed Erica but disputed much of Carnes’s account, insisting that he had killed Brenda as well. Carnes had been arrested and faced the possibility of a capital charge and death sentence; prosecutors offered him a substantial deal if his evidence helped convict both brothers. The competing accounts therefore came from witnesses with different stakes, and Dan’s version did not erase the central fact that Ron was present during the killings.

Late on July 24, the brothers went to bed in a Wendover motel room. The next morning they discovered that Carnes and Knapp had left with the Impala and its contents, leaving them with little beyond the clothes they wore. Dan said he did not blame the men and interpreted their sound sleep as a sign that events had unfolded as meant to be. Ron proposed that they split up, hitchhike across Nevada, and meet near Reno at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks, a casino they had visited earlier that summer. Dan caught a ride in an eighteen-wheeler to Reno, spent the night beside a historic steam locomotive displayed in a city park, and waited around the Nugget until Ron arrived.

The brothers were arrested as they stood in line at the casino’s lunch buffet. Dan recalled seeing men he took to be Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before officers rushed up and pointed guns at them. Both men surrendered without resistance and were held in the Reno jail under extraordinary security. Their initial posture toward the prosecution was evasive: from arrest through their 1985 convictions, neither brother confessed to the murders. Dan’s later willingness to speak openly marked a substantial change. By the mid-1990s, he accepted that he would spend the rest of his life in prison and believed his imprisonment was part of God’s plan for humanity.

Dan’s disclosures became important to Ron’s retrial. In 1991, the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Ron’s 1985 convictions, ruling that the trial court had used a faulty standard when deciding whether Ron was mentally competent to stand trial. During the later proceedings, Dan’s account placed Ron inside the apartment during the killings and described Ron’s violence against Brenda. The account made it harder for Ron to maintain his earlier claim that he had known nothing about the murders, even as Dan continued to insist that he alone had used the knife. Dan’s narrative thus implicated his brother while preserving a distinction between their physical actions—a distinction that did not make either man’s participation disappear.

Brotherhood, Rupture, and Prison Theology

Dan and Ron’s relationship combined religious alliance with deepening conflict. In August 1995, they encountered each other in Judge Steven Hansen’s Provo courtroom during the proceedings before Ron’s retrial. Ron greeted Dan in a friendly manner. The next day, in their cell, Ron attacked him. Dan said that he did not resist, and that the beating continued until Ron could no longer strike him. At the time, Dan attributed the assault to problems Ron was having with bad spirits. The contrast between the public greeting and the sudden prison violence exposed how little their shared history of religious action guaranteed trust or safety between them.

Dan’s own beliefs also changed after his arrival in prison. He said that his convictions had undergone a major evolution and that he had abandoned both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon fundamentalism. The faith that replaced them combined material from the Old Testament, the New Testament, The Book of Mormon, fundamentalist scripture, and Dan’s own elaborate interpretations. He came to believe that he was Elijah, the biblical prophet, and that his task in the Final Days was to announce the Second Coming of Christ. In this account, he cast himself as a forerunner preparing the way for the returning Son of Man.

Dan’s trajectory gives the book a particularly stark example of how a claimed duty to obey revelation can eclipse responsibility to other people. His early caution about whether Ron’s command came from God did not prevent him from accepting it; once the brothers classified their intended victims as wicked, their religious judgment made murder appear permissible to them. Yet the later record also resists a single, settled account of Dan. His testimony was consequential, his description of his own acts remained disputed against Carnes’s, and his theology continued to change in prison. The former political candidate and plural-marriage advocate ended not with a return to ordinary religious authority, but with a new private prophetic identity and a conviction that his own imprisonment belonged to a divine design.