Ricky Knapp

Ricky Knapp is a recently released man who joins Dan Lafferty and Ron Lafferty during their 1984 road trip and becomes entangled in the events surrounding the murders of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. His trajectory runs from a chance friendship with Dan to participation in the brothers’ journey, then to an increasingly uneasy flight from the law. When he and Chip Carnes finally leave the Laffertys, their decision helps investigators recover evidence and learn where the brothers may have gone.

Meeting Dan in Wichita

During a period when Dan and Ron had separated, Dan arrived in Wichita, Kansas, several days before Ron. He found temporary work through a local employment office, helping demolish an old bank. Knapp, twenty-four and recently released from jail, was on the same crew, wielding a shovel. Dan later described the two as becoming friends through conversation and said he liked Knapp. Without a roof of his own, Knapp accepted Dan’s invitation to sleep in the back of the Impala.

When Ron arrived, Knapp chose to continue the journey with the brothers. Before they left Wichita, he took Dan to a field where an acquaintance who grew marijuana had discarded leaves and stems from a harvest. Knapp and Dan gathered some of the discarded material and stowed it in the car. The episode gives their new association an ordinary, improvised beginning: a worksite friendship, shelter in a car, and a shared errand before a trip whose stakes would become far more serious.

Joining the journey

Knapp’s place in the group developed through a sequence of encounters and practical decisions. On the drive south, he was with Ron and two of Laurene Grant’s sons when they met Chip Carnes, a young drifter whose car had lost its brakes at a rest area outside Sacramento. Ron offered to help get the car to a repair shop. The group managed the trip by using a spare tire attached to the Impala as a point of contact, with Carnes steering his disabled car while Ron used the station wagon to help slow it.

Carnes could not afford the repair. He sold the car to the mechanic, put the small amount he received toward the group’s gasoline, and joined Ron, Knapp, and the boys in the Impala. Knapp thus became part of a shifting party whose members were linked less by a settled plan than by movement, shared transport, and the brothers’ expanding circle of companions. The journey eventually brought the group toward southern Utah, where Dan had gone ahead with Grant.

By the time the party reached Chloe Low’s home in Highland, Utah, Knapp was still travelling with Ron and Dan and was present with Carnes during the events of July 24, 1984. The stated plan had been to kill Low and then go to the home of Richard Stowe, president of the Highland LDS Stake. Low and her family were away at their summer home on Bear Lake for the Pioneer Day holiday. Ron changed the immediate plan to breaking into the house and searching for valuables and weapons; Knapp went inside with Ron and Dan while Carnes remained outside as lookout. They took cash, a watch, keys, and jewelry, and Ron destroyed Low’s collection of porcelain figurines.

From the missed turn to flight

After leaving Low’s home, the group set out toward Stowe’s residence. Knapp was driving, following Ron’s directions, but missed a turn. Dan later recalled that the group discussed whether to turn back. Carnes urged Ron to abandon the rest of the plan, and Ron agreed; the men continued toward Interstate 15 instead. Knapp’s wrong turn became a decisive interruption in the group’s course: they did not reach Stowe’s home that afternoon.

The four men drove through Salt Lake City and continued west toward Reno, Nevada. As they travelled, Knapp asked what had happened at the apartment of Allen Lafferty and Brenda Lafferty. Dan’s later account was that he told Knapp and Carnes in detail about killing Brenda and her baby, Erica, and made clear that he, rather than Ron, had used the knife. Carnes gave a different account in sworn testimony at a later trial, saying that Ron had told them about the murders. The accounts differ over who described the killings, but both place Knapp in the car as the group drove away from Utah and show that he learned what had happened during the journey.

Near Wendover, Nevada, the men rented a motel bungalow. Later that night, they left again in the Impala, with Knapp driving. A Nevada Highway Patrol officer stopped them because the car’s taillights were out and it was leaking gasoline. The officer did not recognize them as fugitives and told Knapp to take the car back across the Utah line rather than risk it catching fire in Nevada. The men replaced a fuse, but it failed again, so they returned to the motel to wait for daylight.

Leaving the Laffertys

The encounter with the patrol officer deepened Knapp and Carnes’s fear. While Ron and Dan rested, Knapp and Carnes went out to buy cigarettes and discussed their growing alarm. Carnes said he intended to leave once the brothers fell asleep. Back in the room, he quietly took the car keys and told Knapp he was going; Knapp answered that he would go too.

They pushed the Impala down the road before starting it, so the brothers would not hear the engine. Knapp drove as they headed west on Interstate 80, then north on U.S. 93 toward Twin Falls, Idaho, before taking back roads toward Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Carnes’s brother lived. Their escape did not immediately free them from the evidence of the crimes: they found the knife, a bag containing Dan’s bloody clothes, and a suitcase with razors in the station wagon, and threw these items out along the route. Knapp’s departure was therefore both a break with the brothers and a panicked attempt to distance himself from the journey’s evidence.

Arrest and cooperation

Knapp and Carnes reached Gary Carnes’s home in Cheyenne on Thursday morning. Four days later, police found the Impala parked outside, raided the house, and arrested them. The book describes both men as having been drawn into the Laffertys’ murderous campaign and facing the possibility of severe punishment. When officers explained the danger, Knapp and Carnes agreed to tell investigators what they knew in return for a promise of leniency.

Their cooperation had concrete investigative consequences. Police recovered the murder weapon and most of the other evidence that the pair had discarded during their flight across Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming. Knapp and Carnes also told detectives that the brothers had discussed going to Reno, giving police a lead on Ron and Dan’s whereabouts. Knapp’s story consequently ends not with his continued allegiance to the Laffertys, but with his separation from them and his assistance to investigators. His role remains marked by both participation and retreat: he travelled with the brothers, was present during consequential events, and then chose escape and cooperation when the danger of remaining with them became unmistakable.