Under the Banner of Heaven (22 page)

Such scandalous behavior was completely new to Ron, who was both enthralled and taken aback by what he saw during his extended visit to Bryant’s commune. When one of the prophet’s wives let Ron know she found him attractive, Ron was extremely tempted to hop into bed with her, but he worried that doing so might make Bryant jealous and angry, so he left and returned to Utah.

Ron arrived back in the Provo area just after Bernard Brady had introduced Dan to Prophet Onias, the Canadian fundamentalist. Dan in turn introduced Onias to Ron and the other Lafferty brothers, and very soon thereafter, Ron, Dan, Mark, Watson, and Tim Lafferty were inducted into Onias’s School of the Prophets. Allen, the youngest sibling, was eager to participate as well, but Brenda put her foot down. “She refused to let Allen join,” LaRae Wright confirms.

Although standing up to Allen meant standing up to the entire Lafferty clan, Brenda did not shy away from such confrontations. Not only was she quite willing to argue theology with the Lafferty brothers, she possessed an impressive command of LDS scripture that allowed her to more than hold her own when debating fundamentalist doctrine with Ron and Dan. They came to despise her for defying them and for her influence over Allen, whom they considered “pussy-whipped.”

When Ron’s father was dying of diabetes, Ron had called a family meeting to discuss the funeral and other details. Allen brought Brenda to the meeting, which made Ron furious. He called her a bitch and worse, and berated her with such unrestrained spleen that Brenda finally left in tears. But she did not remain intimidated very long.

“Brenda was the only one of the Lafferty wives who was educated,” Betty points out. “And her education was what they were afraid of. Because Brenda was confident in her beliefs, and her sense of right and wrong, and she wasn’t about to let anyone take that away from her. She felt it was her duty to defend the other women. She was their only hope.” Reflecting on the load her little sister had shouldered, Betty pauses before continuing: “At that point she was still just twenty-three years old.

To be that young, and to be surrounded by all these older people who were supposed to be more mature than she was—yet she was the one who they turned to.“ Betty pauses again. ”My sister was an amazing woman.“

Although Brenda managed to keep Allen from joining Onias’s School of the Prophets, she could not prevent him from associating with Dan and his other brothers. “But she tried to keep a watchful eye on him,” says Betty. “Around this time my little sister, Sharon, and I went to visit Brenda and Allen. While we were there, Brenda made sure that whenever Allen went anywhere, either Sharon or I went with him. Then when we’d get home she’d question us about where he went, and who he talked to. At the time I thought that was kind of weird. Now I see that she was just trying to keep tabs on how much he was talking to his brothers.”

FIFTEEN

THE ONE MIGHTY AND STRONG

As a religious city-state under tight control, Nauvoo was a haven where the followers of Joseph Smith had their most important choices
—
what they should do to serve God
—
made for them… and their identity as God’s chosen people was assured through him…

As is common in such situations, the threat of evil was projected onto others… Hence, at Nauvoo the innocent children of God realized their identity through their struggle against the evil followers of Satan, who dominated American society everywhere except in the city of the Saints.

The problem, of course, with this kind of dichotomous myth is that, for the people who hold it, guilt and innocence become matters of belief, not evidence.

John E. Hallwas and Roger D. Launius, Cultures in Conflict

When the Utah businessman and Dream Mine supporter Bernard Brady brought Prophet Onias and the Lafferty brothers (minus Allen) together one crisp fall evening near the end of 1983, it seemed to all who were present to be an especially auspicious union. There was an instant feeling of kinship and shared values, and the men talked excitedly until “the wee hours of the morning,” according to Onias. Giddy with their sense of divinely empowered mission, everyone at the gathering was convinced that, collectively, they were destined to alter the course of human history.

“Five of the six brothers,” Onias said, “became extremely enthusiastic when they realized that we had just been given a commandment by the Lord to send three sections of
The Book of Onias
to all the stake and ward authorities.”* He was referring to a revelation he’d received on November 26 of that year, in which God had commanded Onias to “prepare pamphlets to send out to the presidents of stakes and bishops of wards of My church”—the LDS Church—so that those who had committed fornication against Him would “be warned.” The pamphlet consisted of excerpts from Onias’s collected revelations, cautioning the entire LDS leadership—from the president and putative prophet in Salt Lake City down to the bishop of every ward across North America—that God was extremely unhappy with the way they’d been running His One True Church.

*
The Book of Onias
is an alternative title for
The Second Book of Commandments;
they are the same book. The LDS Church is organized into “stakes” of approximately three thousand members, which are the rough equivalent of archdioceses in the Catholic Church, and “wards,” which are the neighborhood congregations within each stake. Typically each stake is made up of between five and twelve wards.

God was especially steamed, Onias explained, that modern Mormon leaders were blatantly defying some of the most sacred doctrines He had revealed to Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century. Most egregiously, the men at the helm of the church continued to sanction and zealously enforce the government’s criminalization of plural marriage. And only slightly less disturbing, from Onias’s perspective, was the blasphemy perpetrated by LDS President Spencer W. Kimball in 1978 when he decreed that black-skinned men should be admitted into the Mormon priesthood—a historic, earth-shaking turnabout in church policy widely applauded by those outside the church. God had revealed to Onias, however, that blacks were subhuman “beasts of the field, which were the most intelligent of all animals that were created, for they did walk upright as a man doeth and had the power of speech.”**

** In the LDS faith, all males deemed worthy are inducted into the “priesthood” at the age of twelve, which entails the assignment of specific responsibilities and privileges, as well as conferring inestimable status within the church. Before 1978, blacks were denied admission into the priesthood—a major affront that helps explain why there are relatively few Mormons of African descent. Women of all races continue to be barred from the priesthood.

According to the pamphlet, God had given Onias an earful about blacks being ordained as LDS priests:

Behold I say unto you, at no time have I given a commandment unto My church, nor shall I… that the children of Ham, even the Negro race and all its peoples, should receive My holy Priesthood…

And have I not spoken to My servant Joseph Smith, even your head, that none of this race could or would be ordained to My holy Priesthood until the seed of Abel shall rise above the seed of Cain?…

For Satan was the founder of this black race, for he came to Cain after God had taken away his power to procreate the children of righteousness, and showed him how he could place his seed into animals, and the seed of animals into other animals, for he did corrupt the seed of the earth in this manner, hoping to thwart the works of God.

And for this reason the earth was destroyed by the flood, to destroy from the face of the earth these abominations which Cain created, for he had corrupted all flesh…

For Satan has infiltrated My church, and seeketh to become its head.

But those who have heeded him shall shortly be exposed by their folly, for [neither] My name nor My church shall be mocked longer, for it shall shortly be cleansed and purged and tried in the fire, that all those who profess to know Me, and know Me not, will be exposed.

The pamphlet further warned that God had dispatched Onias to “cleanse My house of its filthiness” and put the institutions of Mormondom back on the road to righteousness. God had revealed,

I shall endow [Onias] with My Spirit, and the wicked he shall expose, and they shall not stand, and they shall gnash their teeth in anger, and their anger shall eat them up.

For I am the Lord God Almighty, and My words shall not be mocked…

And what a great noise and commotion they shall make when they fall…

And My servant [Onias] who is held in derision, I shall place in him My Spirit, and he shall be as a fire that devoureth; and the words that he shall write and speak shall expose many and cause many to fall, for they repent not.

By sending this pamphlet to the leaders of the LDS Church, Onias intended to give them the opportunity to make a choice: confess their errors and turn over control of the church to the Lord’s chosen prophet, the “one mighty and strong,” or face God’s wrath. To a detached observer this seems like an act of astonishing naivete and hubris on Onias’s part, but the pamphlet’s text resonated with tremendous power for the Lafferty brothers. It had the ring of long-denied truth. They believed they had found, in Onias, a crucial ally in their struggle to restore the church of Joseph Smith to righteousness and prepare the earth for the Second Coming of Christ.

Onias was no less enamored of the Laffertys, and what they could do to advance his ambitions for the School of the Prophets. Applying the full brunt of their prodigious energy, the Lafferty brothers dived headlong into the tedious chore of printing, folding, and collating more than fifteen thousand of Onias’s pamphlets, then addressing and mailing them to LDS leaders around the country. “It was like a miracle to us,” Onias says, “for what would have taken us several months to accomplish in our spare time, they were able to accomplish in two weeks working day and night.”

By early 1984 the newly established School of the Prophets was meeting on a weekly basis, usually at the Provo home of the Laffertys’ mother, Claudine, upstairs from the family chiropractic clinic. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the five brothers, the school got off to a flying start. Onias appreciated the Laffertys’ pivotal role in his school’s successful launch. The Laffertys, it seemed to him, were heaven-sent.

Onias soon got confirmation that in fact they were. On January 8, he received a revelation in which God explained that before the Lafferty boys were even born, He had singled them out “to be an elect people, for they are the true blood of Israel and the chosen seed.” Six weeks later, Onias received another revelation in which God commanded him to appoint Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter, which he gladly did. All the younger brothers, including Dan, clearly looked up to Ron—as indeed they had their entire lives. When Ron assumed the bishop’s responsibilities, everyone in the School of the Prophets approved.

Ron’s promotion to a position of authority lifted his morale at a moment when such a boost was sorely needed, because the prior months had delivered an avalanche of setbacks and disappointments. As Ron recorded in a journal entry,

The events of the past year have caused me to do a great deal of research and scripture study and spend a great deal of time on my knees in prayer. I have been stripped of all my material wealth, my family has divorced me and moved to Florida, I have been unjustly excommunicated from the church that I love so dearly.

Ron no longer had a job or a regular paycheck. He was regarded as a pariah by his church and community. Because the home he’d so painstakingly built with his own hands had been taken from him, he was reduced to living out of his 1974 Impala station wagon—the only asset of any value still in his possession. And yet he claimed in his journal to be grateful for such humiliations, saying, “These experiences have caused me to establish a personal relationship with my Father in Heaven and He has revealed to me, at least in part, the outcome of all these trials.”

Though Ron claimed to enjoy wearing a hair shirt, however, his actions suggested otherwise. The departure of his wife and their six children to a distant corner of the nation gnawed at him day and night. Over time his hurt was transformed into an implacable rage, and most of that anger was directed at the three individuals who, in his estimation, bore responsibility for Dianna’s decision to abandon him: Richard Stowe, Chloe Low, and Brenda Lafferty.

Stowe, a pharmacist by trade and a neighbor of Ron and Dianna’s, was president of the LDS Highland Stake. He directed the stake’s High Council Court, which had tried Ron in August 1983 and subsequently excommunicated him. Much worse, in Ron’s view, Stowe had offered crucial financial assistance to Dianna, via the church, which had allowed her to survive while the divorce was being finalized; and Stowe had also provided a great deal of counseling and emotional succor.

Chloe Low had been an uncommonly close friend to both Ron and Dianna for a dozen years. Her husband, Stewart Low, was the bishop of Ron and Dianna’s LDS ward, and had handpicked Ron to be his first counselor in the bishopric. Chloe had long admired the Lafferty family, and she went to Dan for chiropractic treatment when her back gave her trouble. As Ron and Dianna’s marriage began to fall apart, Chloe offered unstinting support to both of them, but when Ron’s behavior grew increasingly monstrous, she came down firmly on Dianna’s side of the fence. Once, when Ron was making life particularly unbearable for Dianna, Chloe invited her and her children to stay in the Low home for four days; on another occasion Chloe took them in for ten days. After the execution of the divorce, Chloe had been there to help Dianna and her kids pack up the shards of their broken lives and move to Florida. As Ron saw it, without Chloe Low’s advocacy and assistance, Dianna would never have had the wherewithal to leave.

The greatest portion of Ron’s long-simmering wrath, however, was reserved for Brenda Wright Lafferty—Allen’s smart, beautiful, headstrong wife—whom Ron regarded as being instrumental in persuading Dianna to abandon him.