Under the Banner of Heaven (23 page)

Rejected by his wife, scorned by his community, Ron poured himself completely into the School of the Prophets. It became his family, his life, his world. Much of Ron’s time with the school was occupied by expediting the shipping of the pamphlets to LDS leaders, urging them to abandon their ungodly path. But the school’s main thrust, as Onias had conceived it, was to teach the faithful how to receive and interpret revelations from God, and as the winter of 1984 edged toward spring, Ron began receiving this instruction in earnest.

On February 24, Ron became the first of Onias’s students to take delivery of a commandment from the Almighty. Sitting at a computer he’d borrowed from Bernard Brady, Ron closed his eyes and waited until he felt the spirit of the Lord cause a finger to depress a key, and then another, and another. By and by, a message from God inched across the screen: Ron’s inaugural revelation. He received a second revelation on February 25, and a third on the 27th.

Upon witnessing his brother receiving revelations from God, Dan was spellbound, and excited. “I never received any revelations when we were in the School of the Prophets,” he explains. “Everyone else in the school did, and I’ve received revelations since then, so now I understand the phenomenon, but I didn’t at that time. So I was fascinated. I’d ask, ”What is it like?!“ Ron said it was hard to describe, but I remember once he said, ”It’s like a blanket falls over you, and you can feel the Lord’s thoughts, and you write them down.“ One revelation came to him a single word at a time, and he didn’t even know if it was coherent until he was done receiving it, and then went back and read it. But they didn’t always come that way. Sometimes he’d receive whole phrases at a time.”

The revelation Ron received on February 27 was in fact a message from the Lord to Ron’s wife, with Ron simply serving as the conduit. In this commandment God reiterated that the earth would soon be destroyed, and He warned Dianna:

Thou are a chosen daughter but My wrath is kindled against thee because of thy rebelliousness against thy husband, and I command thee to repent. Have I not said that it is not good for a man to be alone? I will not suffer My servant Ron to be alone much longer for even now I am preparing someone to take thy place. Nevertheless if thou wilst speedily repent I will greatly bless thee and thy children, otherwise I will remove thee from thy place for I will not suffer that thy children should suffer longer because of thy disobedience. I have heard the prayers of My son Ron and I know his desires, and it is only because of his desires that I have spared thee till now.

Harken unto My word for the time is short. I am Alpha and Omega even the beginning and the end and surely I will fulfill all My promises unto My servant Ron. Even so Amen.

According to psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck, who examined Ron after the murders, as Ron began to understand that Dianna really was going to take their children and leave forever, it slowly “becomes clear that this man is losing the most important thing he’s ever lost in his life… I can’t stress enough how deep this loss was… He feels low, worthless. And his anger and aggression are almost unbounded… He compensates by creating a new but unreal view of himself and the world. He develops an inflated God-like self-image in an effort to avoid the pain and deny the truth of what he really is.”

Buttressing Dr. Groesbeck’s assessment, on March 13 the still small voice of the Lord spoke to Ron once again, revealing,

And the thing that ye have thought concerning the One Mighty and Strong is correct, for have I not said that in these the last days I will reveal all things unto the children of men? For was not Moses the One Mighty and Strong, and was not Jesus the One Mighty and Strong, and was not My servant Onias the One Mighty and Strong, and art thou not One Mighty and Strong, and will I not yet call others Mighty and Strong to set in order My church and My kingdom? For it was never meant that there should be only one One Mighty and Strong, for there are many, and they who have thought otherwise have erred.

In Dr. Groesbeck’s learned opinion, this revelation was a delusional artifact, as were all Ron’s revelations, spawned by depression and his deeply entrenched narcissism, with no basis whatsoever in reality. Which is, of course, what nonbelievers typically say about people who have religious visions and revelations: that they’re crazy. The devout individuals on the receiving end of such visions, however, generally beg to differ, and Ron is one of them.

Ron
knows
that the commandments he’d received were no mere figment of his imagination. The Lord spoke to him. And he wasn’t about to believe the words of some faithless, pencil-neck shrink over the voice of the Almighty. That, after all, would really be crazy.

Before actually carrying out the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, Ron hadn’t done anything that was terribly outlandish, or unique, according to the cultural norms of Utah County. Ron’s revelations can be viewed, in one sense, simply as a time-honored response to a major life crisis—a response exhibited by many a religious fanatic before him. In
Feet of Clay,
a study of self-proclaimed prophets, English psychiatrist Anthony Storr points out that such gurus often receive momentous revelations and profound insights immediately following a period of mental distress or physical illness, in which the guru has been fruitlessly searching for an answer to his own emotional problems. This change is likely to take place in the subject’s thirties or forties, and may warrant the diagnosis of mid-life crisis. Sometimes the revelatory answer comes gradually; at other times, a new insight strikes like a thunderbolt… The distress of chaos followed by the establishment of a new order is a typical course of events which takes place in all creative activity, whether in the arts or the sciences. This
Eureka
pattern is also characteristic of religious revelation and the delusional systems of people we label insane.*

*Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from
Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus
by Anthony Storr. Copyright © 1996 by Anthony Storr.

Prompted by Onias’s instruction, throughout February and March Ron received approximately twenty revelations. Some he recorded on Brady’s computer on the spot, as they came to him; more often he kept the revelations in his head for a while before committing them to print, in order to mull them over and better understand them.

The most disturbing of Ron’s revelations occurred in late March, and he recorded it by hand, on a sheet of yellow legal paper:

Thus Saith the lord unto My servants the Prophets. It is My will and commandment that ye remove the following individuals in order that My work might go forward. For they have truly become obstacles in My path and I will not allow My work to be stopped. First thy brother’s wife Brenda and her baby, then Chloe Low, then Richard Stowe. And it is My will that they be removed in rapid succession and that an example be made of them in order that others might see the fate of those who fight against the true Saints of God. And it is My will that this matter be taken care of as soon as possible and I will prepare a way for My instrument to be delivered and instructions be given unto My servant Todd.* And it is My will that he show great care in his duties for I have raised him up and prepared him for this important work and is he not like unto My servant Porter Rockwell** And great blessings await him if he will do My Will, for I am the Lord thy God and have control over all things. Be still and know that I am with thee. Even so Amen.

*Todd was Michael Todd Jeffory Judd, a beefy, fair-haired hitchhiker whom Watson Lafferty had happened to pick up one afternoon. Todd was hungry, so Watson brought him to Claudine Lafferty’s home for a meal, where he met some of the other Lafferty brothers and was invited to attend meetings of the School of the Prophets. Todd stayed at Claudine’s for two weeks, then, around the time Ron received this revelation, traveled to Arizona with Watson for three additional weeks to work for him on a construction project. Todd and Watson began to quarrel, however, and one day Watson returned to the apartment they were sharing to discover that Todd had stolen all of his belongings and disappeared, ending his association with the Lafferty clan and the School of the Prophets before he could be called upon to “remove” the named individuals.

** Orrin Porter Rockwell, the “Destroying Angel,” who, in 1842, attempted to assassinate Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri, Joseph Smith’s nemesis. Rockwell, who served as the personal bodyguard to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, was celebrated by nineteenth-century Mormons for killing scores of men deemed enemies of the LDS Church with his .44-caliber Colt revolver. A popular, long-established restaurant in Utah County, called Porter’s Place, is named after him.

Upon receiving this revelation, before sharing it with others in the School of the Prophets, Ron showed it to Dan. “Ron was a little bit frightened by the things he was receiving,” says Dan. “I told him, ”Well, I can see why you’re concerned, as well you should be… All I can say is make sure it’s from God. You don’t want to act on commandments that are not from God, but at the same time you don’t want to offend God by refusing to do his work.“

Over the days that followed, both Ron and Dan pondered the removal revelation intensely. During this period Ron had yet another revelation, in which he was told that he was “the mouth of God” and Dan was “the arm of God.” The brothers interpreted this to mean that Dan was to do the actual killing.

Seeking further guidance, they considered a passage near the beginning
of The Book of Mormon
in which Nephi—the obedient, highly principled prophet “who had great desires to know the mysteries of God”—is commanded by the Lord to cut off the head of Laban of Jerusalem—a scheming, filthy-rich sheep magnate who turns up in the pages of both
The Book of Mormon
and the Old Testament.

Nephi at first resists the commandment: “I said in my heart, never at any time have I shed the blood of man, and I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.”

But then God speaks to Nephi again: “Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth His righteous purposes: It is better that one man should perish, than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”

Thus reassured, Nephi says in
The Book of Mormon,
“I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.”*

* According to several accounts, when Joseph Smith dug up
The Book of Mormon
on the Hill Cumorah in 1827, he found Laban’s sword in the ancient stone box that held the golden plates.

Thanks to a revelation Ron had received back on February 28, the story of Nephi slaying Laban was imbued with special significance for Dan. In this revelation, God had commanded:

Thus saith the Lord unto My servant Dan… Thou art like unto Nephi of old for never since the beginning of time have I had a more obedient son. And for this I will greatly bless thee and multiply thy seed, for have I not said if ye do what I say I am bound!?] Continue in My word for I have great responsibility and great blessings in store for thee. That is all for now. Even so Amen.

This revelation had a tremendous impact on Dan: after God had declared that he was like Nephi, according to Mark Lafferty, Dan “was willing to do anything that the Lord commanded him.”

In the fundamentalist worldview, a sharp dividing line runs through all of creation, demarcating good from evil, and everybody falls on one side of that line or the other. After much praying, Ron and Dan decided that the four individuals God had commanded them to remove must, a priori, be wicked—they were “children of perdition,” as Dan phrased it— and therefore deserved to be murdered. Having determined that the so-called removal revelation was true and valid, the Lafferty brothers further concluded that “it would be wise to act on the things it suggested.”

Whenever a member of the School of the Prophets received a revelation, it was standard procedure for the commandment to be presented to the other members for evaluation. On March 22, just before the school’s weekly meeting at Claudine Lafferty’s home, Ron took Bernard Brady into a side room and handed him the removal revelation. “He asked me to look it over,” says Brady, “and then he left the room. As I read it, my hands began to shake. I got cold all over. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.” When Ron returned a few minutes later, Brady told him, “This scares me to death. I don’t want to have anything to do with anything like that. I think it is wrong.” When the meeting commenced a few minutes later, neither Ron nor Brady said anything to the other members about the revelation.

Ron had brought to that meeting a woman named Becky, whom he’d recently taken as a spiritual wife without benefit of a license or civil ceremony. The couple then went to Wichita, Kansas, for a honeymoon, so Ron wasn’t present when the school met the next time, on March 29; nor was Dan. Watson showed up with a pearl-handled straight razor, however, which he asked the somewhat puzzled members to “dedicate as a religious instrument for destroying the wicked, like the sword of Laban.”

“Of course we refused,” says Onias, who did not yet know about the removal revelation. Watson was angered by this rebuff, Onias remembers, and “left the meeting with a bad spirit.”

Tensions between Onias and some of the Lafferty brothers—primarily Watson, Ron, and Dan—had been building for several weeks. Soon after he had been appointed bishop of the school, Ron had begun to openly challenge Onias’s authority. Onias noticed a distinct change in Ron’s personality, “from an extremely kind gentleman to a man full of hate and anger. In his position as bishop, he started to dictate to everyone, and would get angry if they didn’t do what he said.” When Onias urged all members of the school to seek gainful employment in order to fund the construction of a “City of Refuge” below the Dream Mine, which was one of the school’s priorities, Ron angrily criticized him, arguing that there was no need for anybody to get a job, because surely God would provide the school with sufficient wealth, through miraculous means, to complete their work.

In one of Ron’s revelations, God had, in fact, instructed him to send his brother Mark to Nevada to wager on a horse race to raise funds for the City of Refuge. With the Lord letting Mark know which mount to bet on, it seemed that they couldn’t lose. But they did. Afterward, Onias couldn’t resist telling the brothers, “I told you so,” causing relations between Ron and the prophet to deteriorate even further.

Around Thanksgiving of 1983, when Ron had gone to Oregon to visit John Bryant’s polygamist commune, he had been introduced to some new sensual experiences, including intoxicants. As part of their religious rituals, Bryant’s group administered wine as a sacrament, and Ron partook with the others. Having been raised in a household that was strictly abstemious, this was his first experience with alcohol, and he found it quite agreeable. It gave him a nice, mellow feeling that “heightened his sense of the spirit.” Thereafter Ron described wine as “the gift of God.”

Thus introduced to the pleasures of “strong drink” (as alcoholic beverages are negatively characterized in Section 89 of
The Doctrine and Covenants),
when Ron returned to Utah he insisted that the School of Prophets substitute wine for the juice or water they ordinarily served as a sacrament at the beginning of each meeting. This was another direct challenge to Onias’s authority, and it provoked a dramatic confrontation during the meeting of March 9- On that occasion Ron continued to gulp down glasses of wine after the sacrament was offered, and was soon stinking drunk. He began to mock Onias, who had refused the wine and taken water instead. According to Onias, Ron “kept ridiculing me, saying that I was too old and slow and it was about time I was released. He did this very sarcastically and said that the Lafferty brothers should take over. He was supported by Dan and Watson.”

It was in this atmosphere of growing rancor that Ron’s removal revelation was put before the school for evaluation. During the meeting of April 5, he showed a copy of it to all the members and asked them to confirm its validity. The nine men who were present that evening earnestly discussed the revelation, then held a vote to determine its legitimacy as a divine commandment. “Ron, Dan, and Watson were in favor of accepting it as a valid revelation,” says Bernard Brady. “Everybody else said, ”No way! Don’t even consider it! Forget the whole thing!“ At which point Ron, Dan, and Watson became really angry, got up, and walked out of the meeting, ending their association with the school.”

The disagreement among the school’s members that evening underscores the conundrum that inevitably confronts any prophet who encourages his acolytes to engage in dialogue with God: sooner or later, God is apt to command an acolyte to disobey the prophet. And to true believers—to zealots like Ron and Dan Lafferty—the word of God will trump the word of a mere prophet like Onias every time.

Worried that Ron might actually attempt to carry out the removal revelation and murder the four named individuals, Brady formally registered his concern in an affidavit, which he signed and had notarized on April 9:

State of Utah County of Utah

AFFIDAVIT

KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE presents, that I, Bernard Brady, a Free and Natural Citizen of the United States of America, do hereby depose and say that I have reason to believe and fear that lives of the following ten people are in jeopardy: Robert Crossfield; Bernard Brady; David Olsen; David Coronado; Tim Lafferty; Mark Lafferty; Brenda Lafferty; Brenda Lafferty’s baby daughter; Chloe Low; and Richard Stowe.

I, Bernard Brady, do further depose and say that it is my belief that this jeopardy results from the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, understanding, and potential actions of the following four individuals: Ron Lafferty; Dan Lafferty; Watson Lafferty; and Todd (last name unknown).

Brady’s concern was genuine and acute, but he didn’t alert the police; nor did any other members of the School of the Prophets. Brady merely filed the affidavit in a desk drawer in his home, so that if Ron did kill anyone, Brady could prove that he was blameless.

Neither did any of the school members—despite their alarm upon learning of the removal revelation—see fit to alert any of the people designated for removal. Later that month, however, Dan took it upon himself to inform his youngest brother, Allen, with whom he had always been especially close, that God had commanded the ritual murder of Brenda and their baby girl, Erica, and that Ron and Dan intended to see that the commandment was carried out.

Allen expressed shock, then asked, “Why? Particularly why Erica, being an innocent child? Why would she be involved?”

At which point Ron angrily cut in, “Because she would grow up to be a bitch, just like her mother!”

Dan earnestly asked Allen what he thought of Ron’s revelation. Allen replied that because he, personally, hadn’t received any such revelation from God, he couldn’t accept it; he said he would defend his wife and child with his life. But Allen never bothered to tell Brenda of his brothers’ declared intent to murder her and their baby.

Betty McEntire, Brenda’s older sister, hasn’t been able to reconcile the fact that Allen withheld this information. “If he had told Brenda about Ron’s revelation,” Betty insists, “she would have been out of there in a minute, and she’d still be alive today. But Brenda didn’t know anything about it. I can’t understand why none of the people who did know about it never warned her. Especially Allen. It was like he was starting to succumb to his brothers.

“Brenda loved Allen, and he showed over and over again that he wasn’t worthy of her love. Your duty, as a husband, is to protect your wife and child, and he let them down. I think Allen learned about the revelation way back in April, yet he said nothing. I can’t comprehend that. I can’t forgive him for that. All these years later, I’m still terribly angry. That he betrayed her love. That he had the very best, and he just threw it away.”

In May 1984, Ron and Dan left Utah in Ron’s dilapidated Impala wagon and began an extended sojourn across most of the American West and into Canada, stopping along the way to call on various fundamentalist communities. Nobody in the School of the Prophets heard from Dan or Ron through all of June and most of July. “I felt a little better with them out of the area,” says Bernard Brady, “because they weren’t going to be around to commit any murders. It seemed like the direction things were going, nobody had anything to worry about.”

But early on the morning of July 25, the phone rang as Brady was getting ready to go to work. “It was Tim Lafferty,” says Brady, his voice breaking as he remembers the moment. “He said… um… he said, ”Bernard, I’ve got some bad news. They carried out the revelation. Ron and Dan. They killed some people yesterday.“ ” Brady covers his face with his hands, then continues. “My legs buckled. I collapsed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

SIXTEEN

REMOVAL

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. *

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

* Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised,
edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1924 by the Macmillan Company; copyright renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

Even though Brenda was unaware of the removal revelation, she had plenty of other reasons to fear all the Laffertys, including Allen. And fear them she did, but that didn’t deter her from standing up to the brothers on behalf of Dianna and the other wives.