Highland is a small, prosperous, semirural community at the foot of the Wasatch Range, just north of American Fork and midway between Provo and Salt Lake City. In the account of the Lafferty family, it is more than a geographic marker: it is the place where Ron and Dianna Lafferty established a home, where Ron’s public religious standing and private financial troubles collided, and where he later directed himself after violence had already begun. Highland’s calm suburban setting makes the change in Ron’s life especially stark: a family once admired by its acquaintances became divided by religious radicalization, economic fear, and flight.

Setting and family life

After his mission in Florida, Ron married Dianna, a nursing student, and brought her to Utah to live near his parents and siblings. They settled in Highland and raised six children there. Ron worked operating heavy equipment for a construction company owned by a fellow Mormon, while also becoming a prominent figure in the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation. By 1982 he was a Highland city councilman, a first counselor to the bishop, and a leader of youth activities.

The community saw the Laffertys as an unusually happy couple. Their marriage had lasted sixteen and a half years, and people who knew them remembered it as a model that other young women hoped to emulate. This reputation belonged to a recognizable local life: a large family, a husband with civic and church responsibilities, and a household rooted in the rhythms of Highland. That public picture did not reveal the trouble accumulating beneath it, but it helps explain the shock felt by those who knew them when the marriage came apart.

Building projects and financial crisis

Highland was also the site of Ron’s ambitious effort to build security for his family. After his regular workday, he spent much of the evening constructing a four-unit apartment building financed by a bank loan. He used the remaining hours to work on a dream house for his own family. Both projects were in Highland, and together they consumed time and money beyond the household’s means. Even before the crisis, the family’s cash flow was stretched to its limit.

The regional recession turned that pressure into an immediate threat. Ron and Dianna fell behind on loan payments; money for groceries and the children’s clothes grew scarce, and the bank had prepared papers to take the home Ron had labored to build. The threatened loss was not abstract: it endangered the house and future that his after-hours work was meant to secure. Dianna tried to reassure him that they could begin again, but Ron feared that their sacrifices would be lost. Highland thus becomes the setting where an economic reversal left Ron especially vulnerable to a new explanation of what his life and losses meant.

Religious rupture and departure

Dianna had become concerned about the effect of Dan Lafferty’s fundamentalist teachings on the wives of Ron’s brothers. In August 1982, she asked Ron to speak with Dan and the other brothers and try to change their course. The meeting took place at the Lafferty parents’ home in Provo, not Highland, but its consequences followed Ron back into his Highland household. He arrived as a committed mainstream church member intent on challenging Dan; after hours of argument, he accepted Dan’s fundamentalist position and concluded that the others were right.

Ron began attending the brothers’ meetings regularly, discarded his driver’s license, removed the license plates from his vehicle, and quit his construction job. These decisions came while the family was already close to financial ruin and while his building projects remained unfinished. The shift in belief therefore registered in Highland not only as an ideological break but as a practical upheaval in the home and livelihood that his family depended on. Dianna and their children eventually left him for Florida. Their departure, and the help Dianna received from others in the local church community, became central to the anger Ron directed at those he believed had enabled her to go.

Local ties and the return toward Highland

The rupture also played out through Highland’s church and neighborhood connections. Richard Stowe, a neighbor and president of the LDS Highland Stake, had led the High Council Court that tried and excommunicated Ron in August 1983. Stowe also helped Dianna financially through the church and gave her emotional support as the divorce was completed. Chloe Low, a close friend of both Ron and Dianna for twelve years, likewise became a practical source of refuge: she took Dianna and the children into her home on two occasions, then helped them pack and move to Florida. Ron came to regard her support as one of the reasons Dianna had been able to leave.

After Brenda Lafferty and her baby had been killed, Ron and Dan travelled in an Impala. Ron guided the car carefully, taking care not to exceed the speed limit, and headed for Highland, where he and Dianna had once lived with their children and where Chloe still lived. His destination made the town’s earlier domestic associations part of the immediate geography of his plan. Highland was not merely the place he had lost; it was the place where he intended to confront another person he blamed for that loss. The account establishes his course toward Chloe’s home, not that the subsequent attack occurred in Highland. Still, the return marks the final reversal in the town’s role: the setting once identified with family, work, and community became the point toward which Ron’s grievance and violence were moving.