Wichita became a brief but consequential stop in Ron Lafferty and Dan Lafferty’s 1984 road trip. It was where the brothers’ separate itineraries converged, where Dan met Ricky Knapp and invited him into their improvised traveling household, and where the group acquired marijuana before heading west. The city’s role in the journey was temporary, but it helped shape who traveled onward with the brothers.

A rendezvous during the road trip

Ron and Dan had occasionally split up during their journey, staying apart for a week or two before meeting again. On one such interval, Ron boarded a freight train east while Dan drove the Impala on a different route. Dan reached Wichita in mid-June, several days ahead of his brother, and waited there for their reunion.

The stop came during a trip that stretched from weeks into months. As Dan later recalled the journey, he had become alarmed by Ron’s growing agitation and his increasingly urgent talk of carrying out the removals. Ron eventually fixed on July 24 as the date. Dan said he prayed for direction about whether to continue with his brother or leave him, and believed the answer was to stay. Wichita was one pause in that increasingly fraught journey, though the account does not place the conversation about the date at a specific spot in the city.

Work, friendship, and a new passenger

While waiting for Ron, Dan found day labor through a local employment office. He joined a crew tearing down an old bank and met twenty-four-year-old Ricky Knapp, who was working with a shovel. Knapp had recently been released from jail and, without a place to live, was sleeping rough. Dan recalled that the two became friends through conversation and that he liked Knapp.

Dan offered Knapp a place in the back of the Impala, and Knapp accepted. When Ron arrived in Wichita soon afterward, Knapp chose to join the brothers for the rest of their road trip. The car that had carried Dan alone between rendezvous points thus became the shared vehicle for three travelers, and a chance encounter at a demolition job altered the composition of the party.

The last stop before heading west

Before leaving Wichita, Knapp took Dan to a field outside town where an associate, a small-time marijuana farmer, had discarded the leaves and stems left after the saleable buds were trimmed. Dan and Knapp gathered the low-grade material in a grocery bag and hid it in the Impala. Dan later described it as poor-quality marijuana that could produce a mild buzz only after several large joints. The account establishes that the two collected and stored it; it does not say that they used it in Wichita.

The brothers’ wider purpose on the road was to recruit support for a City of Refuge they hoped to build on Onias’s property below the Dream Mine. The mine’s directors had rejected their earlier offer of labor and then refused Ron and Dan’s demand that they hand over its management. Despite those rebuffs and their expulsion from the School of the Prophets, the brothers continued pursuing the refuge project among prominent polygamists. At the beginning of July, Ron, Dan, and Knapp left Wichita in the Impala, heading west toward John W. Bryant’s commune in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Wichita therefore marks both a reunion and a transition: the point where Knapp joined the road party before its search for allies continued.