Pamela Coronado

Pamela Coronado is a former mainstream Mormon missionary who became a devoted follower of Onias and his School of the Prophets with her husband, David Coronado. Her journey from questioning the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to embracing fundamentalist belief gives the book a close view of religious conversion as both a doctrinal choice and an experience of spiritual certainty. Although Pamela believes in plural marriage, she and David have not practiced it; she describes her commitment as rooted most deeply in the spirit she feels within herself.

Identity and Background

The account presents Pamela in her early forties, married to David and raising their daughter, Emmylou. She grew up in Provo in a traditional Mormon family, not a fundamentalist one. Her father had bought shares in the Dream Mine, a detail she recalls with pride, but her family background did not itself place her in Onias’s religious circle.

In 1978, when she was twenty-one, Pamela went on a mission to France. She could testify to the truth of The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, but she struggled to affirm that the contemporary Church president was the Lord’s only true and living prophet. At the time, that president was Spencer W. Kimball. His revision of Church doctrine to allow Black men to enter the priesthood sharpened Pamela’s doubts about the institution’s direction. Her questioning began not with a rejection of Mormon origins, but with uncertainty about the authority and course of the modern Church.

From Missionary Doubt to the Work

After her mission, Pamela returned to Provo and taught at the Missionary Training Center, where she met David. They married eight months later. David had been born in Colonia LeBaron, Mexico, and came from the LeBaron clan. His family had emigrated to the United States after a follower of Ervil LeBaron fired at David’s mother during the violence associated with Ervil’s campaign. David’s history placed fundamentalist Mormonism close to family danger, yet as an adult he came to believe it offered the true path to God.

Pamela’s own doubts about the mainstream Church had continued to grow since her mission. After marrying David, she came to share his fundamentalist outlook. In 1984, the couple encountered Onias—Robert Crossfield—through The Book of Onias, which they found in a used-book store. They were struck by what they understood as a resemblance between his revelations and those of Joseph Smith, including the revelations in The Doctrine and Covenants. David contacted the book’s publisher, the Philosophical Library, to find Onias; they learned that he had moved his base to the Provo area.

Their first meeting with Onias took place at a Lafferty family home in Provo. From there, Pamela and David entered what the book calls the Work. At the time she is later shown stripping wallpaper in a farmhouse Onias had recently acquired, a domestic task set within the community they had joined. Their conversion thus grew from reading, personal contact, and a sense that the new revelations carried the authority of the founding prophet.

Faith Tested by Violence

Six months after Pamela and David joined, Dan Lafferty murdered Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. The killings shocked those around Onias’s community. Because the Coronados were associated with the Lafferty family, others treated them as evil, and they were excommunicated. Pamela recalls that for a time her family feared for their lives. The murders therefore brought both public suspicion and personal fear into the life they had chosen.

Neither the killings nor the harassment that followed displaced Pamela’s faith in Onias and the Work. She and David continued to regard the Church’s decision to extend priesthood to Black men as a grave apostasy, and both remained convinced of the principle of plural marriage. Their persistence matters alongside the rupture: the murders did not merely expose the risks of association, but became a test after which the Coronados stayed with the fundamentalist movement rather than returning to the mainstream Church.

Plural Marriage and Spiritual Conviction

Pamela’s belief in plural marriage did not mean that she and David had entered such a marriage. They had considered it repeatedly, and there had been women who were close to the family and mutually drawn to it, but the arrangements never came to pass. Pamela acknowledged that it had seemed too difficult at the time. Later, she believed she could live the Principle more easily as she grew older, and imagined another woman’s talents benefiting her children. She did not deny that such a household would involve difficulty; she held possibility and difficulty together without claiming the arrangement had already become reality.

For Pamela, however, plural marriage and disputes over priesthood were not the heart of faith. She treated these doctrinal controversies as surface-level reasons for joining and located the deeper basis in an inward spiritual experience. Onias, present in the same conversation, contrasted that experience with what he saw as the loss of spirit in the mainstream Church. Pamela’s conviction is rendered as something fervent and sustaining: she described feeling filled with an inner fire. The emphasis is less on a debate settled by argument than on an experience she regarded as directly compelling.

Family, Inheritance, and Narrative Role

Pamela’s daughter Emmylou offers a glimpse of how that conviction might continue into another generation. Emmylou had designed a house on the Internet according to the Principle. The plan was for a one-story home eighty-five feet long and seventy-seven feet wide, with an open central courtyard, separate rooms for girls and boys, a nursery, a father’s master bedroom, and rooms for the mothers. It also left space for a third wife. The design turns an abstract religious commitment into a proposed domestic arrangement, while remaining a plan rather than an account of a household already established.

Pamela’s trajectory complicates any account of fundamentalist adherence as simply a return to a particular marriage practice. Her commitment includes support for plural marriage and rejection of the mainstream Church’s change, but she distinguishes both from what she considers the spiritual core of belief. The sequence of missionary doubt, encounter with Onias’s revelations, affiliation with his community, and continued faith after the Lafferty murders shows how the movement could draw adherents from within Mormon families even as the mainstream Church moved toward greater social normality. In Pamela’s case, the clearest sign of continuity is not a marriage she has entered, but the daughter’s carefully planned home and the religious future it imagines.