Under the Banner of Heaven (39 page)

During their visit to Reno earlier that summer, Ron and Dan had made the acquaintance of a woman named Debbie who worked as a blackjack dealer at Circus Circus. She had befriended the brothers and let them crash on her floor; they’d returned the favor by baby-sitting her young child when she went to work. According to Dan, the brothers “had a rather curious miraculous experience while we were visiting with her”: Debbie had bought a puppy for her little boy, and the dog was quite sick with canine parvovirus—a disease much like distemper in cats, usually fatal. Dan placed his hands on the dog’s head and gave it a blessing, he says, “and it appeared to be instantly healed. I remember how impressed Debbie was—I was, too, but tried to act like it was no big deal.”

Although it might sound like yet another manifestation of Dan’s extreme fundamentalist beliefs, performing blessings is an entirely ordinary ritual among mainstream Latter-day Saints. Mormon men will commonly lay hands on the head of a family member or fellow Saint and pronounce a blessing in order to heal or to provide comfort in times of stress. Countless Mormons have testified that they were cured of serious illnesses through the laying on of hands. As Kenneth Anderson wrote in a 1999
Los Angeles Times
article,

This peculiar commingling of mystical (as well as historically unsupported) doctrines on the one hand and pragmatic rationality on the other is a strong feature of contemporary Mormons as individuals. Educated Mormon culture has long been characterized, for example, by outstanding physical scientists and engineers, as strictly rational as possible in their worldly work yet devout in their adherence to many historical beliefs that would not pass the test of rational science, and believers, moreover, in deeply mystical ideas, even if they would not represent them as such. My own father spent his career as a chemistry professor and university dean, a dedicated and rational teacher of science. Yet in the Mormon Church his function… for many years has been to deliver blessings, to put his hands on the heads of church members and tell them things as moved by God, which are recorded, transcribed and kept by the church member as a meditative guide to God’s intentions for him or her in life. Surely, to an outsider, this is very close to wild mysticism, yet my father is far indeed from being a wild mystic. Nor is it that he bifurcates his rational life from this mystical experience and has some sort of existential disconnect between them. On the contrary, his experience of giving these Mormon blessings is that the process of “following the spirit” is itself “reasonable,” in a way that is highly characteristic of the Mormon trait of perceiving mysticism as a rational practice.

TWENTY-THREE

JUDGMENT IN PROVO

Critical examination of the lives and beliefs of gurus demonstrates that our psychiatric labels and our conceptions of what is or is not mental illness are woefully inadequate. How, for example, does one distinguish an unorthodox or bizarre faith from delusion?…

Gurus are isolated people, dependent upon their disciples, with no possibility of being disciplined by a Church or criticized by contemporaries. They are above the law. The guru usurps the place of God. Whether gurus have suffered from manic-depressive illness, schizophrenia, or any other form of recognized, diagnosable mental illness is interesting but ultimately unimportant. What distinguishes gurus from more orthodox teachers is not their manic-depressive mood swings, not their thought disorders, not their delusional beliefs, not their hallucinatory visions, not their mystical states of ecstasy: it is their narcissism. *

Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

* 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.

It’s August 5, 2002, a Monday morning, and outside Utah’s Fourth Judicial District Courthouse merchants and businessmen are striding purposefully to work in downtown Provo. Although it’s still early in the day, the heat is already rising from the pavement in visible waves. Inside the courthouse, the clock on the wall shows 9:21 when the bailiff abruptly shouts, “All rise! The Honorable Steven Hansen presiding!” The murmur from the gallery subsides, and a moment later a side door swings open, through which sixty-one-year-old Ron Lafferty, attired in orange coveralls with UDC INMATE stenciled across the back, is hustled into the courtroom by four armed sheriff’s deputies.

Ron’s reddish-brown hair, now streaked with gray and thinning across the crown, is neatly trimmed. Except for a bushy, Yosemite Sam mustache, he is clean-shaven. For the past few months, according to the prison grapevine, he has been obsessively lifting weights and working out; his bulging forearms and thick shoulders appear to confirm the rumor. Ron sits at the defense attorneys’ table with his hands manacled awkwardly behind his back, staring defiantly at the judge.

Looking edgy and hyperalert, the deputies guarding Ron are taking their responsibilities very seriously. The inmate in their custody has been sentenced to die for viciously murdering a young woman and her baby. They know that, at this point, he doesn’t have a whole lot left to lose.

“Good morning, Mr. Lafferty,” Judge Hansen says in a formal but amiable voice.

“What’s up, Stupid Stevie?” Ron fires back with an insolent sneer. The judge has started explaining to the inmate why he was summoned from death row to appear before the court this morning when Ron cuts him off: “I know what it’s about, you fucking retard!”

Unruffled, the judge informs Ron that a warrant for his imminent execution has been filed by the state and that he has thirty days to tell the court whether or not he intends to make a last-ditch challenge to his conviction and sentence; if not, an execution date will be set. Judge Hansen also tells Ron that the state will appoint new counsel to shepherd him through the remainder of the appeals process. Ron indicates that his first choice for a new attorney would be Ron Yengich, the lawyer who engineered the controversial plea bargain that spared the life of forger and murderer Mark Hofmann, Dan Lafferty’s good friend and cell mate. Ron Lafferty then emphatically declares that he intends “to pursue any appeals that are available to me.” He makes it clear that he is going to fight the state’s efforts to kill him all the way to the bitter end.

More than seventeen years have passed since Ron was first sentenced in this same courthouse to be shot to death for murdering Brenda and Erica Lafferty, yet here he is, still belligerently among the living. His ongoing legal maneuvers ensure that the agony of Brenda’s family is refreshed on a regular basis. “The trials dragging on and on have been hard,” admits LaRae Wright, Brenda’s mother. “Some of our children have had quite a struggle. And my husband, especially. But that’s just the way it goes. We’re doing okay now. And we’re glad that Brenda’s in a better place, out of this cruel world.”

“Brenda would be forty-two now,” says Betty Wright McEntire, Brenda’s older sister. “We all still miss her a lot. When they had that first trial, the prosecutors asked us not to attend. They were worried about my dad. They didn’t think he could handle it.”

Immediately following the murders, detectives removed most of Brenda’s possessions from the apartment she’d shared with Allen Lafferty, as evidence. “After the police had gone through it all, they put the things they didn’t need for the investigation into a storage unit,” Betty says. “But Allen never paid the rental fee, so the storage company called, and my mother and I drove down to American Fork to take possession of Brenda’s stuff. Eventually my dad started looking through it—her journals and scrapbooks and personal items. And that’s when he fell apart. He just cried and cried.

“Reading what she wrote in her journals, my dad started thinking, ”Why didn’t I do something to save her? Why didn’t I get her out of there?“ As her father, he thought he should have been able to protect her somehow, but he couldn’t. And now his little girl was gone, and his first grandchild, too. I think he struggled with that for a long time.” Capital murder cases must inevitably proceed carefully and deliberately to avoid any chance of a wrongful execution. But the long, slow machinations of American jurisprudence have done little to ease the ongoing suffering of Brenda’s father, mother, or siblings.

During the original trial back in 1985, Ron’s court-appointed attorney had attempted to mount an insanity defense, hoping for a manslaughter conviction rather than first-degree murder, but Ron had objected to such a stratagem, even though it stood a reasonable chance of saving him from the firing squad. He’d refused to allow any psychiatric testimony to be presented on his behalf. The judge on that occasion, J. Robert Bullock, was concerned that Ron might not fully comprehend the probable outcome of his refusal to consider an insanity defense, so he demanded, “You do understand, Mr. Lafferty, that you are probably leaving the jury with only two choices: to find you guilty of first-degree murder or not guilty?”

“I do, your honor,” Ron answered.

“And you understand that if there is a guilty verdict there will be a penalty hearing,” Judge Bullock asked further, “and at that hearing the jury could impose the death sentence?”

“I understand that,” Ron replied, “but I can’t in good conscience, Your Honor, plea-bargain. It seems to me that is an admission of guilty.” Ron remained resolute in insisting that he wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t going to let his lawyer claim otherwise in order to negotiate the murder-one charges down to manslaughter.

Hamstrung by Ron’s obstinacy, his lawyer had to cancel plans to present several witnesses whose testimony would have made a strong case that the defendant was a religious kook. The only witness left for the defense to call was Ron’s mother, Claudine Lafferty, who broke down and cried on the stand, then blatantly perjured herself by professing to be unaware that Ron and Dan had talked openly in her presence of killing her daughter-in-law and grandchild. It probably surprised nobody but Ron when the jury returned after deliberating for just two hours and forty-five minutes and announced that they had found him guilty of all charges, including two counts of first-degree murder.

Following his conviction, Ron was given a new team of attorneys, who appealed to both the U.S. District Court and the Utah Supreme Court. Ron was rebuffed on each occasion, but his lawyers persisted. By 1991 his case had landed in the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado. And this court, in a ruling that shocked most of Utah, tossed out Ron’s 1985 convictions. In vacating the findings of the state trial court, the Tenth Circuit declared that the lower court had bungled things right out of the gate by applying a faulty legal standard when it determined that Ron had been mentally competent to stand trial.

Although the judges of the Tenth Circuit agreed that Ron understood the charges against him and their possible consequences, they concluded that “he was unable as a result of his paranoid delusional system to interpret them in a realistic way.” The bench was troubled by Ron’s belief that because he answered to the laws of God, he need not answer to the laws of man. They thought this was a pretty clear indication that the guy was not in his right mind. If the state of Utah wanted to keep him locked up, the judges announced, it was going to have to try him again, from scratch, after first redetermining whether he was crazy or sane according to accepted legal criteria.

The Tenth Circuit’s ruling had a profound effect on Ron Lafferty and the families of his victims, obviously, but it potentially had even greater ramifications for the manner in which American courts would deal thereafter with violent crimes inspired by religious belief. As Utah Solicitor General Jan Graham explained, “We are concerned about what this decision means not only for the Lafferty case but for other cases.” She warned that it might set a precedent that would “immunize” religious fanatics from criminal prosecution.

Theologians mulled other potential consequences of the Tenth Circuit’s ruling, as well. As Peggy Fletcher Stack, a highly regarded religion writer for the
Salt Lake Tribune,
pointed out, “Saying that anyone who talks to God is crazy has enormous implications for the whole world of religion. It imposes a secular view of sanity and means that all religions are insane.” This issue was especially germane for Latter-day Saints, given the unusual importance Mormons have always placed on communicating directly with the Almighty. Their entire faith is based on talking to God.

The state of Utah was not happy about having to toss out Ron Lafferty’s conviction and give him a new trial, but it complied with the Tenth Circuit Court’s edict—the first phase of which entailed rigorously reassessing Ron’s mental competency. The upshot was a hearing in late 1992 wherein a trio of doctors, after examining Ron, convinced the Fourth District Court in Provo that he was not fit to stand trial.

Having been found incompetent, Ron was transferred from death row at Point of the Mountain to the Utah State Hospital, but the state had no intention of abandoning its efforts to convict and execute him for murder. Following sixteen months of psychotherapy, which included putting Ron on a course of antidepressant and antipsychotic medications, another competency hearing was held in February 1994. This time around, the team of shrinks assembled by the prosecution proved more persuasive than the shrinks marshaled by the defense, and Judge Steven Hansen ruled that Ron was now sufficiently competent to be tried all over again for slaying Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

After Ron and Dan had initially been arrested, each of them had made a point of being exceedingly uncooperative with the prosecution. When questioned about the murders, the brothers never failed to be coy and evasive. From the time of their arrest through their 1985 convictions, neither man would confess to anything. By the mid-1990s, however, Dan’s attitude and outlook had changed. He accepted that he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars—indeed, he believed that his conviction and imprisonment were crucial components of God’s plan for mankind. As a consequence, Dan became quite willing—eager, even—to talk honestly and openly about exactly what had happened on July 24, 1984.