Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is mentioned at two consequential points in the book’s account of violence associated with Mormon fundamentalist claims: investigators asked the public to share information about a revelation allegedly connected to the Lafferty murders, and FBI agents later found a booklet written by Brian David Mitchell before he abducted Elizabeth Smart. These references place the Bureau within investigations that turned on documents claiming religious authority, though the book provides little detail about its internal procedures or broader role in either case.

The Lafferty Murder Investigation

After Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, were murdered, American Fork Police Chief Randy Johnson said investigators believed Ron Lafferty had written a revelation instructing him to commit the crime. Johnson described the possible document as vital evidence and asked anyone with information to contact either the American Fork Police Department or the FBI. The appeal presents the Bureau as one of the channels through which the public could bring potentially significant evidence to investigators; it does not establish that the document was found or describe any subsequent FBI action concerning it.

The same account warned that the suspects were believed to be armed and dangerous, especially to law-enforcement officials. Neighbors and friends speculated that the killings might have arisen from a religious dispute within the family. In this early stage of the investigation, the alleged revelation was therefore both a possible piece of physical evidence and a clue to the religious rationale investigators were examining.

The Mitchell Booklet

A separate reference follows the rescue of Elizabeth Smart and the arrest of Brian David Mitchell. FBI agents discovered a twenty-seven-page booklet Mitchell had written two months before the abduction. Titled The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah, it presented itself as a divine manifesto announcing a new fundamentalist church, the Seven Diamonds Plus One, and identified Mitchell as a divinely appointed leader in a succession extending from biblical prophets through Joseph Smith.

The booklet’s discovery gave investigators a material record of Mitchell’s religious claims, while the book uses its contents to frame a broader discussion of the faith shared by Mitchell, Dan Lafferty, and other fundamentalists. The document’s claimed prophetic authority is presented as Mitchell’s assertion, not as an established religious or legal fact. The passage does not specify how the agents found the booklet or what investigative steps followed its discovery.

Investigative Presence and Limits

Across these episodes, the Bureau’s documented role is concrete but narrowly described: it was named as a contact for information in the Lafferty case, and its agents discovered Mitchell’s pre-abduction writing. The first reference concerns a document investigators hoped to locate; the second concerns a document recovered after the rescue and arrest. In both, written claims of revelation connect religious language to criminal investigations, but the available account does not attribute the murders or abduction to the Bureau’s findings alone.

The book does not provide a general history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, identify its personnel in these cases, or detail its coordination with local and state authorities. Its significance here lies instead in the contrast between the public appeal for a still-unconfirmed revelation and the later discovery of a specific manifesto: one is presented as a crucial lead investigators wanted the public to help produce, while the other offers a tangible record of a suspect’s self-proclaimed prophetic identity.