Provo, Utah, sits between Utah Lake and Provo Peak and serves as the seat of Utah County. In the book, it is both a center of institutional Mormon life and the home of the Lafferty family: the city’s orderly public face and the family’s local prominence frame a story that culminates in a murder trial held there.

Setting and civic role

The book describes Provo as a practical, growing city of slightly more than 100,000 people, spread across the flats between Utah Lake and the eleven-thousand-foot Provo Peak. Its position an hour down the interstate from Salt Lake City makes it part of the same regional landscape as the Church’s headquarters, while its status as the county seat gives it a local civic importance of its own.

Provo is also a center of religious education. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints operates its Missionary Training Center there, from which, according to the book, 30,000 young men and women depart each year to proselytize around the world. Brigham Young University, owned and tightly controlled by the Church, is described as Mormonism’s flagship institution of higher learning. Together, the training center and university make the city a place where religious identity is taught, organized, and carried outward.

The Lafferty family’s home ground

The Lafferty family had a reputation in Utah County before the murders that brought its name wider attention. Watson Lafferty, the family patriarch, was a chiropractor with a thriving practice in his home in Provo’s historic downtown quarter. He and Claudine Lafferty raised six sons and two daughters, instilling strong work habits and intense devotion to the Mormon Church. The family was admired locally for its industry and probity.

Provo also anchors the family’s later public history. Allen Lafferty, the youngest son, worked as a tile setter, a trade he had practiced since his teens. In 1984 he lived with Brenda Lafferty and their infant daughter, Erica Lafferty, in nearby American Fork, while the family name remained closely associated with Provo and the surrounding county. The contrast between the family’s earlier respectability and the crimes committed against Brenda and Erica gives the city’s local familiarity with the Laffertys a darker significance.

Religious and educational atmosphere

The book’s account of Brigham Young University emphasizes how visible religious norms shaped everyday campus life. More than 99 percent of its 30,000 students were white, and students were described as neatly dressed and carefully groomed. Rules barred men from beards, tattoos, and piercings; women faced restrictions on attire and the number of ear piercings. Smoking, profanity, alcohol, and coffee were also forbidden.

Order extended even to the campus grounds: students were expected to stay on the sidewalks rather than cross the manicured grass. The portrait makes Provo more than a backdrop for the Lafferty story. It presents a local culture in which religious discipline could be expressed through institutions and ordinary habits, as well as through the family loyalties that had helped make the Laffertys prominent.

The murder trial

Provo became the site of a consequential legal reckoning. Dan Lafferty’s trial was scheduled to begin there, and after the jury deliberated for nine hours it found him guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. He had insisted on defending himself, leaving his appointed attorneys in advisory roles. At the subsequent sentencing hearing, he told jurors he would impose the death penalty in their position and said he would not appeal if they chose it.

Ten jurors voted for death, but two did not, and the required unanimity was lacking. Dan’s life was therefore spared. The trial places Provo at the meeting point of the book’s larger contrasts: the city’s religious institutions and close-knit family histories on one side, and the authority of the courts to judge individual acts on the other.