Mark Lafferty

Mark Lafferty, Dan Lafferty’s younger brother, was a chiropractor who became involved in his brothers’ increasingly religious and anti-government discussions and helped launch Onias’s School of the Prophets. His place in the account is defined by a sharp contrast: he appears both among those whom a fellow school member feared might be in danger and, on July 24, 1984, as the person who handed Ron Lafferty a shotgun. The evidence records what Mark did and said that day, but does not establish what he knew about the murders his brothers intended to commit.

Family and Work

Mark graduated from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic six months after Dan. When their parents left on a two-year Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission in 1981, the brothers agreed to take over their father’s chiropractic practice in Provo. The practice operated from a basement office in the home their parents had bought in the old downtown area after selling the family farm.

The brothers’ partnership at work followed an unusually close relationship from childhood. Dan recalled that they had been inseparable, sharing daily chores and spending their summers together. Their younger brothers later joined their play, but Mark and Dan’s bond remained distinctive in the family history presented here. Working together again gave the two older brothers a setting for long conversations during breaks between patients.

Those conversations increasingly turned to religious doctrine and the brothers’ conviction that government had grown intrusive and unjust. Dan led many of the discussions, invoking scripture to argue against government requirements such as licenses, taxes, and Social Security numbers. Mark was among the brothers who gathered for these talks. The account does not provide a separate statement of Mark’s precise views, so his presence in the discussions should not be mistaken for evidence that he originated or endorsed every claim Dan made.

The School of the Prophets

Mark joined Dan and their other brothers in helping Onias establish the School of the Prophets. The brothers undertook the practical work of printing, folding, collating, addressing, and mailing more than fifteen thousand of Onias’s pamphlets to Church leaders. What would otherwise have taken months was completed in two weeks of work, helping the school begin its weekly meetings in early 1984 at the Lafferty family home in Provo.

Onias interpreted the brothers’ effort through his religious framework. On January 8, he received a revelation describing the Lafferty boys as chosen before birth; six weeks later, another revelation directed him to appoint Ron bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. The younger brothers, including Mark, looked up to Ron, and the school accepted his appointment. This placed Mark within a group whose shared family loyalties and religious work would soon be strained by competing claims to revelation and authority.

The record gives one specific glimpse of Mark’s involvement when Ron acted on a revelation directing him to send Mark to Nevada to bet on a horse race and raise money for a planned City of Refuge. The revelation promised that God would identify the winning horse. The wager failed. Onias’s response to the loss further worsened the relationship between Ron and the school’s leader. The source does not say how Mark understood the revelation or describe his own response to losing the money; it does establish that Ron’s plan assigned him a role in the attempt.

A Warning Mark Did Not Receive

As Ron, Dan, and Watson Lafferty’s relations with Onias deteriorated, the school considered Ron’s removal revelation, which named people for death. At a meeting on April 5, nine men discussed whether the document was a divine command. Ron, Dan, and Watson supported accepting it; the other attendees rejected it, and the three brothers left the school. Mark is not identified as one of the three supporters, and the account does not specify how he voted or whether he attended that meeting.

Bernard Brady was sufficiently alarmed to prepare and notarize an affidavit listing ten people whose lives he believed were in jeopardy. Mark was among them. Yet Brady put the affidavit away in a desk drawer rather than alerting the police, and no one at the school warned the people named in it. The threat therefore reached the reader as a documented concern, not as a warning delivered to Mark. The account does not say that Mark knew his name had been included.

The Guns on July 24

On Pioneer Day, July 24, Dan sawed down a 12-gauge shotgun at his mother Claudine Lafferty’s house while Ron, Ricky Knapp, and Chip Carnes loaded a car. Later, the four men drove to Mark’s farm to retrieve a 20-gauge shotgun that Dan had lent him years earlier. Mark handed it to Ron and asked what he planned to do with it. Ron said he was going hunting. Mark pointed out that no game was in season and asked what he would hunt; Ron gave a threateningly broad answer.

The exchange shows Mark questioning Ron’s explanation, but it does not establish what Mark inferred or whether he knew about the planned attack. The men then went to a gravel quarry to test their weapons. They discovered that the ammunition they had brought for a .270-caliber deer rifle was the wrong size. Returning to Mark’s home, they asked whether he knew where Ron’s .243-caliber rifle was. Mark said he thought it was at Allen Lafferty’s house. The brothers drove there, where Ron went to the door alone; Brenda Lafferty and her daughter Erica were killed later that day.

Mark’s actions in this sequence remain consequential without resolving his knowledge or intention. He transferred a weapon, challenged Ron’s stated purpose, and supplied information that directed the group toward another firearm. The account gives no basis for claiming that Mark knew what the men would do after leaving his farm, or that he took part in the killings.

Conflicting Accounts and the Limits of the Record

During the drive toward Nevada after the murders, Dan and Chip Carnes later offered differing accounts of who described what had happened in the apartment. Dan said he himself explained the killings and emphasized that he, rather than Ron, had used the knife. Carnes testified that Ron had told the story, and recalled Ron describing his own attack on Brenda. These accounts concern the brothers’ statements to their companions, not Mark’s presence or knowledge, and they do not resolve his role.

The evidence leaves Mark’s story incomplete. It establishes his closeness to Dan, his work in the family practice and the new religious school, his appearance in Brady’s affidavit, and his actions during the effort to obtain guns on July 24. It also preserves the unanswered tension between his skepticism toward Ron’s hunting explanation and his assistance in locating another rifle. Without evidence that Mark was told of the plan or understood the weapons’ intended use, that tension should remain a question about the limits of the record rather than a verdict about his intent.