Erica Lafferty

Erica Lafferty was the infant daughter of Brenda Lafferty and Allen Lafferty. Nearly fifteen months old, she had just begun to speak intelligibly when Ron Lafferty and Dan Lafferty treated her as a target of a supposed divine command. Dan killed her on July 24, 1984, the same day the brothers murdered her mother. The contrast between a young child beginning to find words and a revelation that declared her future already condemned gives Erica’s brief life a central place in the account of how the brothers made violence appear to themselves as religious duty.

Family and Last Days

Erica was still a baby in the days immediately before her death. On July 19, Brenda’s twenty-fourth birthday, Betty Wright McEntire volunteered to drive to American Fork to care for Erica while Brenda and Allen went out for dinner. Betty was looking forward to seeing her sister and niece; Erica had recently begun saying her first intelligible words. The family gathering ended on a strained note. Brenda and Allen returned after an argument, Brenda had been crying, and Betty left after briefly spending time with them. A birthday music box Brenda had received was among the details Betty remembered from that final visit. Her account gives Erica a place in ordinary family life: she was a child being cared for, celebrated, and watched as she began to grow.

That ordinary life is also present in the way the murder was later recalled. Erica was not yet fifteen months old. The people around her knew her as Brenda and Allen’s baby, and Allen and Dan had beards and similar voices. Dan later said he believed Erica might have mistaken him for her father. The details underline how little of the brothers’ religious and political world could have been hers to understand: the purposes they assigned to her came from their own beliefs, not from any action or choice she had made.

Named in a Revelation

Ron’s revelation of February 27 had first addressed his wife, Dianna Lafferty, warning that she could be replaced and threatening to remove her from her place if she did not repent. The revelation presented Ron’s wishes and marital authority as divine concerns. In late March, a more disturbing message, written by Ron on yellow legal paper, named Brenda and her baby among four people to be removed. It called for the named individuals to be dealt with in rapid succession and for their fate to serve as an example. Erica was thus singled out before the attack, not because of anything she had done, but because Ron’s revelation placed her beside her mother as an obstacle to the work he believed God had commanded.

After praying, Ron and Dan decided that the people named in the revelation must be wicked and deserved to be killed. Dan described them as belonging to a class of people spiritually condemned; that classification made a baby’s innocence irrelevant within the brothers’ reasoning. When Dan told Allen that Brenda and Erica were to be murdered, Allen questioned why Erica would be included, especially since she was an innocent child. Ron answered by predicting that she would become like her mother. The accusation converted an imagined future into a purported justification for an irreversible act. Erica was judged not for what she had done, but for the person the brothers claimed she would become.

The Murder and Its Rationalization

On the morning of July 24, Dan prayed and felt prompted to shorten a shotgun he had kept at his mother’s house. Ron, Dan, Ricky Knapp, and Chip Carnes loaded weapons and belongings into a station wagon. Carnes objected that he saw no reason to kill a baby. Ron responded that the revelation had specifically named Erica and argued that killing her along with Brenda would be a blessing because she would otherwise be left without her mother. The explanation presented killing as protection, even as it repeated the command that had made the child a target. Its logic depended on treating a child’s life as something the brothers could dispose of on her behalf.

Dan entered the apartment and subdued Brenda. He later recounted that he went through the home looking for the baby’s room, entered Erica’s room, and killed her with a knife. He said that he closed his eyes and afterward did not know whether she had died until he was shown crime-scene photographs. This account is not needed to make the nature of the act clearer: Dan’s own description, the brothers’ prior plan, and the subsequent journey together establish that Erica’s murder was part of the same planned attack as her mother’s. The narrative does not treat the religious language as a separate, abstract belief. It follows the gap between that language and the actual people it licensed the brothers to harm.

The exact division of actions in the apartment is disputed in testimony about Brenda’s murder. Chip Carnes later attributed the killing of Brenda to Ron and said that Dan killed Erica; Dan disputed parts of Carnes’s account while maintaining his own responsibility for the murders. The account emphasizes that the distinction does not reduce the brothers’ shared culpability. Ron and Dan had accepted the removal plan, brought weapons, and acted together; Erica was killed as part of their joint undertaking.

Loss and Narrative Significance

Erica’s death remained inseparable from her mother’s in the grief of the family. LaRae Wright described the trials and their prolonged course as hard on Brenda’s family. Betty recalled that Brenda would have been forty-two at the time of a later account and that the family continued to miss her. After the murders, police removed many of Brenda’s belongings from the apartment as evidence. Some of the remaining possessions went into storage; when Brenda’s father later read her journals and looked through her scrapbooks and personal things, the loss overwhelmed him. He struggled with the belief that he should have protected his daughter and his first grandchild. The family’s grief gives consequence to what the brothers’ vocabulary of removal had tried to erase: a mother and child were not categories in a revelation but beloved members of a family.

The book also places Erica’s murder against Dan’s later account of the end times. He interpreted the killing as a foreshadowing of a future harvest in which those he considered wicked would be removed. In that framework, his violence became a sign of a divine future rather than a crime against particular people. Erica’s story exposes the moral cost of that substitution. The brothers first classified her as destined for evil, then invoked that classification to make her death seem necessary. Against that claim stand the concrete facts the narrative preserves: her age, her first words, her mother’s birthday, and her family’s continuing remembrance. They restore her, however briefly, from the role the revelation assigned her to the life the brothers’ reasoning denied her.