Ron Lafferty and Dianna Lafferty

Ron Lafferty and Dianna Lafferty were described as a deeply happy couple whose marriage seemed to embody the stability Ron’s later religious transformation would destroy. Their relationship changed after Ron embraced the fundamentalist teachings of Dan Lafferty: a once-considerate husband became controlling, and Dianna, facing his growing advocacy of plural marriage and plans for their daughters, eventually divorced him and left with their six children. In the book’s account, the marriage’s collapse is both a family rupture and a decisive point in Ron’s subsequent history.

A marriage that seemed secure

Ron and Dianna lived with their six children in Highland. In 1982, Ron served on the city council, held a leadership role in the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation, and led youth activities. Friends remembered the couple as unusually close. A friend of Dianna’s recalled that their marriage had been happy for sixteen and a half years, and that young women had wanted marriages like theirs. Ron also occupied a central place in the wider Lafferty family: his younger siblings sought his counsel, and he often mediated disagreements. His role as a steady husband and family supporter made the changes that followed especially stark.

That apparent security existed alongside growing strain. Ron was building a four-unit apartment complex with borrowed money and working on a house for his own family in his spare time. A severe regional recession, missed loan payments, and the threat of losing the family home placed him and Dianna under financial pressure. Dianna was also watching the consequences of Dan Lafferty’s increasingly fundamentalist ideas for her sisters-in-law. In August 1982, she urged Ron to speak with his brothers and try to turn them away from those teachings.

Conversion and reversal

Ron’s visit to the brothers’ religious discussion had the opposite result. He went intending to challenge Dan Lafferty’s beliefs, citing warnings from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about fundamentalism. Dan argued that the church had strayed by abandoning plural marriage and used scripture and political claims to support his position. During the discussion, Ron changed sides: rather than persuading his brothers to return to their previous beliefs, he accepted their fundamentalist outlook. When he came home that night, Dianna’s friend observed that he seemed like a different man.

The shift soon became visible in Ron’s decisions and in the household. He began attending the brothers’ meetings regularly, discarded his driver’s license, removed his vehicle’s license plates, and quit his job. Those decisions further endangered the family’s finances, already strained by the construction projects and recession. Dan’s teaching offered Ron a religious explanation for losing material security and presented him with a promised religious calling. The sequence joined household hardship to a new worldview that treated ordinary obligations to the state and the family’s financial stability as secondary.

Ron also began imposing the domestic rules he had adopted from The Peace Maker. Dianna was expected to take on tasks such as making the family’s butter at home, and friends understood his demands as a sharp break from his earlier attentiveness. Before the conversion, he had treated her with unusual kindness; afterward, he became increasingly harsh and controlling. Dianna tried to reason with him, sometimes accommodating his demands in the hope of changing him, but she also refused to accept everything he required. Her efforts to preserve the marriage were met by a widening gulf between the husband she remembered and the man now guided by Dan’s doctrines.

Dianna seeks help and leaves

As Ron became more extreme, Dianna’s confidence that she could restore their former relationship diminished. His growing enthusiasm for plural marriage alarmed her, and his announcement that he intended to arrange plural marriages for their teenage daughters became a breaking point. She sought help from close friends, leaders of her Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation, and Brenda Lafferty, who was married to Ron’s youngest brother, Allen Lafferty. Brenda urged Dianna to leave Ron for her own sake and the children’s.

Leaving remained daunting. Dianna had six children, had not completed college, had never held a job, and believed she had few practical skills with which to support herself. Even so, she relied on Brenda, friends, and members of her congregation to begin divorce proceedings. The divorce was finalized in autumn 1983. Around Thanksgiving, Dianna packed up the children and moved away, placing distance between them and the Lafferty brothers. Ron, despite having had an opportunity to anticipate her departure, was devastated by the loss of his family. He planned to spend the holidays away from Utah, where reminders of Dianna and the children were close at hand.

The separation also exposed the different claims that had come to govern their relationship. Ron’s new religious commitments placed the authority of fundamentalist teaching above the partnership he and Dianna had built. Dianna’s decision, by contrast, treated her responsibility for herself and the children as grounds to reject his demands. Her departure was not simply the end of a marriage: it marked her refusal to let his increasingly expansive religious authority determine the future of their household.

The separation in later accounts of Ron

Years later, the loss of Dianna and the children was raised in court as part of the defense account of Ron’s mental state. Before his 1996 retrial, defense psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck testified that Ron could not tolerate Dianna’s departure and that it precipitated a severe psychological disturbance. Groesbeck interpreted Ron’s beliefs as delusional and argued that they impaired his ability to understand the case against him. This was expert testimony offered by the defense, not an uncontested conclusion established by the account.

The testimony gave the marriage’s ending a second significance in the narrative. Dianna’s departure had first been a practical escape from a husband whose behavior had become increasingly coercive and whose religious commitments threatened to reshape the lives of their children. In the later legal proceedings, the same rupture was presented as a turning point in Ron’s mental decline. The book thus traces a painful reversal: the marriage once held up as exceptionally happy became the relationship whose breakdown helped define both Dianna’s separation from Ron and the defense’s explanation of what followed.