Richard Stowe

Richard Stowe is a pharmacist, neighbor, and president of the LDS Highland Stake whose support for Dianna Lafferty made him a target of Ron Lafferty’s anger. In the narrative, his practical help during Dianna’s separation becomes the reason Ron assigns him a place among the people commanded to be “removed.” Stowe’s importance lies not in a documented confrontation with Ron, but in the way assistance to a departing spouse is recast as obstruction to a religious mission—and, ultimately, as grounds for threatened murder.

Identity and Position

Stowe worked as a pharmacist and lived near Ron and Dianna. He also held a senior local position in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: president of the Highland Stake. That office brought him into direct contact with Ron’s disciplinary proceedings. In August 1983, Stowe directed the High Council Court that tried Ron and subsequently excommunicated him.

These roles overlapped in Ron’s view. Stowe was not simply a neighbor or a church official carrying out a formal process. He was also a source of help to Dianna during the collapse of the marriage. The combination—ecclesiastical authority on one hand, personal support for Ron’s wife on the other—made Stowe a conspicuous figure in Ron’s account of who had caused his losses.

Support for Dianna and Ron’s Resentment

Stowe provided crucial financial assistance to Dianna through the church while her divorce was being finalized. He also offered her substantial counseling and emotional support. Those actions helped her get through the separation, but Ron interpreted them as evidence that Stowe had contributed to Dianna’s decision to leave him. In his estimation, Stowe bore responsibility alongside Chloe Low and Brenda Lafferty.

The contrast between the practical nature of Stowe’s support and the meaning Ron assigned to it is central to his role in the story. Assistance that enabled Dianna to survive while the divorce proceeded became, in Ron’s framing, participation in his dispossession. Stowe’s financial aid and counseling did not remain separate from the church discipline Ron had undergone: both were folded into a single accusation that Stowe had helped turn his family and religious community against him.

Named in the Removal Revelation

After receiving approximately twenty revelations during February and March, Ron recorded a particularly disturbing one by hand on yellow legal paper in late March. It presented the killing of named people as a divine command intended to clear obstacles from God’s work. Brenda and her baby were listed first, Chloe Low next, and Richard Stowe after her; the revelation demanded that the removals happen in rapid succession and be carried out as soon as possible.

The order of the names gives Stowe a specific place in Ron’s imagined sequence of violence. He was not an incidental name in a generalized threat: the text identified him as a later intended target, following Brenda and Chloe. The revelation also gave the proposed killings a religious rationale, casting the victims as obstacles and their deaths as an example to others. This language transformed Ron’s personal grievance into a purported command with consequences for people who had supported Dianna.

Ron showed the revelation to Dan Lafferty before sharing it with the School of the Prophets. Dan cautioned him to make sure the command came from God, while also warning that refusing divine work could itself be offensive to God. Stowe’s name was therefore present within a conflict over whether the revelation should be trusted, but the warning did not remove him from its list of intended victims.

Threat and Narrative Significance

Bernard Brady later signed and notarized an affidavit naming Stowe among ten people whose lives he believed to be in jeopardy. Brady identified Ron, Dan, Watson Lafferty, and a man named Todd as the individuals whose beliefs and potential actions caused his concern. The document confirms the seriousness with which the threat was regarded within the School of the Prophets. Yet Brady did not alert the police: he put the affidavit in a desk drawer at home, preserving it in case Ron killed someone and Brady needed to establish his own blamelessness.

After Brenda and Erica Lafferty were murdered, Ron and Dan drove toward Highland, Utah, where Chloe lived, and discussed carrying out the remaining part of the revelation. They intended to kill Chloe first and then Stowe, still within the same day. Their conversation treats the list not as a discarded vision but as a sequence they planned to continue. The supplied account establishes Stowe’s place in that plan and the grave threat against him; it does not recount an encounter with him or describe an attempt on his life.

Stowe’s narrative function is consequently both personal and structural. His support helped Dianna leave, and Ron made that support part of the grievance behind the revelation. His name then links an intimate marital rupture to the escalating violence that followed: a church leader’s ordinary acts of financial and emotional aid are reinterpreted as opposition to a self-declared divine work. The gap between what Stowe did and what Ron made it mean exposes how the revelation converted grievance into a claimed mandate for murder.