Under the Banner of Heaven (42 page)

But if all self-proclaimed prophets are narcissists, few narcissists believe they are prophets of God. And fewer still are murderers. These were among the nuances the state asked the jurors to ponder as it tried to persuade them that Ron Lafferty was merely narcissistic and devoutly religious, not crazy, and should therefore be put to death for his role in the killing of Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

On April 10, 1996, after hearing four weeks of testimony and then deliberating for five hours, the jury agreed with the state. Ron was convicted of first-degree murder and related charges—reprising the outcome of his first trial, eleven years earlier, exactly.

Judge Steven Hansen called the court to order on May 31 to impose a sentence. Before doing so, he asked Ron if there was anything he wanted to say. Ron replied to the judge, “Go ahead and do what you gotta do, you little political punk, because that’s all you are is a fucking punk, Stevie Wonder.” Ron continued in this vein for several minutes, calling the judge, among other things, a “fucking idiot” who “comes to work in a dress.”

When Judge Hansen calmly inquired if Ron had made his final statement, Ron said, “Well, my final statement is you can kiss my butt, pal… That will pretty well cover it. Wouldn’t do any good to go any further. Hell, I’m talking to myself right now, probably.”

After confirming that Ron had finished addressing the court, the judge declared, “It is hereby adjudged and ordered that the defendant be sentenced to death.” He then asked Ron whether he preferred to be executed “by firing squad or by a lethal intravenous injection.”

“I don’t prefer either one,” Ron answered. “I prefer to live. That’s what I prefer.”

“If you don’t indicate to me what you prefer,” Judge Hansen explained, “I’m going to impose lethal injection as the method of execution.”

“I’ve already had the lethal injection of Mormonism,” Ron barked back. “And I kind of wanted to try something different this time… I’ll take the firing squad. How’s that? Is that pretty clear?”

“That’s clear,” said the judge, and then sentenced Ron to be shot to death for his crimes—underscoring the fact that Mormon Fundamentalists are by no means the only modern Americans who believe in blood atonement.

Attorney Mike Esplin filed a series of appeals on Ron’s behalf, eventually taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In November 2001, the justices of the nation’s highest judicial body declined to hear Ron’s appeal, virtually assuring that he will be killed by the state of Utah. Ron Yengich, a shrewd and aggressive attorney, replaced Esplin as defense counsel in September 2002. The execution will wait until Yengich exhausts every possibility for reversal, but the sentence is expected to be carried out as early as 2004. Almost nobody, including Dan Lafferty, believes that Ron has any chance of escaping death at the hands of a firing squad.

“I don’t think there is any realistic possibility that my brother will ever beat the death penalty,” Dan confirmed in November 2002. He considers Ron’s execution to be a key piece in God’s blueprint for humankind. In fact, Dan thinks it may well be an indicator that Armageddon is right around the corner—or, as he puts it, “a sign that the Big Party is getting close.”

TWENTY-FOUR

THE GREAT AND DREADFUL DAY

CREIGHTON HORTON, UTAH ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL:

And, essentially, you say that Ron got a revelation indicating that there were people that the Lord wanted to be killed, and you helped him kill those people?

DAN LAFFERTY:

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that statement, saying yes.

CREIGHTON HORTON:

You also indicated to our investigators that you weren’t ashamed to be characterized as a religious fanatic?

DAN LAFFERTY:

No, I have no problem with that.

In August 1995, during the endless rounds of motions and hearings that preceded Ron Lafferty’s retrial, there happened to be an occasion when both Dan and Ron were hauled into Judge Steven Hansen’s Provo courtroom at the same time. Their eyes met, and Ron offered a friendly greeting: “Hey, Bro, what’s happening?”

“Good to see you,” Dan replied with a smile. It was the first time the brothers had spoken to each other in eleven years, since they were confined together in the Utah County Jail. Despite the cordial exchange in Judge Hansen’s court, by 1995 Dan had come to believe that Ron was a “child of the devil”—an agent of Satan who was bound and determined to kill Dan in order to prevent him from fulfilling the rest of the vital mission God has given Dan to carry out.

Dan actually had good reason to believe that Ron wanted to end his life, because the last time they were together he had tried to do just that, and very nearly succeeded. It had happened in December 1984, five months after the murders, while they were sharing a cell in the Utah County Jail as they awaited trial. Dan was lying in his bunk trying to sleep, he remembers, when “I had a funny feeling and opened my eyes to catch Ron creeping up on me.” Discovered in the act, Ron stopped and went back to his own bunk. “But then,” Dan says, “curiously, he asked me if I thought he would be able to kill someone as big as me, and I answered, ”Yes, I suppose so.“ ” From that moment, Dan resolved to watch his back.

The rest of that night passed without incident. The next day, however, while Dan was standing in their cell, he says, Ron “blindsided me in the left temple with a roundhouse haymaker that stunned me but didn’t knock me out.” As Dan turned to face his attacker, Ron unleashed a flurry of blows, smashing Dan’s nose, loosening several of his teeth, and breaking a rib. Dan, who kept his hands by his sides and offered no resistance, says Ron didn’t stop beating him “until his hands hurt too bad to hit me anymore. There was blood all over the floor and walls.” At the time, Dan attributed the assault to problems Ron was having with “bad spirits.”

After the beating, their jailers separated the brothers, placing them in adjoining cells. Not long thereafter, Ron handed Dan a piece of paper through the bars. Written on it was a revelation Ron said he’d just received, in which God commanded Dan to let Ron kill him. After praying for guidance, Dan says, “I felt that I should submit to what it said, and we discussed how it might be done. We thought the best way might be for me to back up to the bars and let him put a towel around my neck and choke me out.”

As soon as Dan agreed to let Ron kill him, he remembers, “I felt the urge to vacate my bowels,” which he interpreted as a further sign that the revelation was valid and should be followed. He understood that going to the commode was part of God’s meticulous plan, Dan says, so that “I wouldn’t make a mess when I died and my muscles relaxed—actually the bowel goes into spasm but the bladder muscles relax when you are throttled.” After finishing up his business on the toilet, Dan “said goodbye to Ron and anticipated seeing God as I backed up to the bars and Ron put a towel around my neck.”

Over on his side of the partition, Ron stood on one foot, braced the other foot against the bars, and then yanked the towel against Dan’s throat as hard as he could and held it there, cutting off the oxygen to Dan’s brain and bursting thousands of tiny blood vessels in his eyes. Just before Dan lost consciousness, he recalls, he experienced “a moment of desperation that was extremely intense… The next thing I remember was coming to on the floor of the cell and slowly recognizing my surroundings” as Ron tried “to explain why he hadn’t carried out the deed.”

It turns out that after Dan blacked out and went limp against the bars, Ron felt God telling him that if Dan took another breath it was a sign that he was supposed to live. When Ron saw Dan’s chest rise and his lungs fill a moment later, he let Dan drop to the floor. Dan’s eyes had turned bright red from all the ruptured blood vessels, and the skin had been scraped off the back of his neck by a horizontal bar, but he kept breathing and regained consciousness.

The next day, Dan says, “Ron started showing signs of torment even worse than he had before. He was pacing back and forth in his end of the cell, mumbling to himself that he would get one more chance and he would have to do it right this time. A couple of days later or so, he handed me another revelation that said I was supposed to let him kill me again, but when I prayed about it I didn’t feel like I was supposed to submit myself to let him do it again.” When Dan indicated that he wasn’t going to comply with the revelation this time, he says, Ron “seemed to get increasingly worse with his personal demons and his torment.”

Immediately thereafter, on December 29, Ron hung himself from a towel rack when Dan was taken away from his cell for questioning; Ron would certainly have died if Dan had returned to find him even a few minutes later. By the time paramedics got to Ron he wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. “His recovery in the hospital was rather miraculous, apparently, which caused a lot of talk,” Dan says. “I also wondered about it… Now, these many years later, I believe I understand at least part of why things have happened the way they have.”

During Ron’s 1996 retrial, the state convinced a twelve-person jury that Ron wasn’t psychotic—that he was fully aware of what he was doing when he participated in the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty and was thus mentally competent to stand trial. “Is Ron crazy?” asks Urah Assistant Attorney General Michael Wims, six years after that conviction. “Yeah, sure, he’s crazy. Crazy like a fox.”

Many Utahans share Wims’s view that Ron’s outbursts in court and his weird religious pronouncements were less than sincere. People think he was merely acting crazy to avoid a death sentence. And they likewise speculate that Ron’s claims to have received revelations from God were a cynical attempt to manipulate and deceive. But almost nobody doubts the sincerity of his brother’s religious faith. Most folks in Utah regard Dan Lafferty’s theology as both preposterous and horrifying, but they concede that he seems to be a true believer.

As it happens, what Dan believes today is not exactly what he believed when he killed Brenda and Erica. “After I arrived in the monastery—after I arrived here in prison—my beliefs went through this major evolution,” he says. No longer does he subscribe to the tenets of Mormon Fundamentalism. “I changed Gods,” he says. “I’d forsaken the LDS Church to go into fundamentalism, and now I’ve forsaken fundamentalism.” These days his theology is a disturbing potpourri assembled from the Old Testament, the New Testament,
The Book of Mormon,
fundamentalist scripture, and the hyperkinetic machinations of Dan’s own mind.

“When you put your whole heart into a search for the truth,” Dan says, “in due course you start to see the contradictions in what you’ve been taught. You start to realize that something doesn’t feel right and doesn’t look right. Something starts to stink… I used to refer to myself as a religious fanatic, but I realize I was kicked out of the LDS Church because I was really a truth fanatic. I have the need to resolve contradictions, which is what got me excommunicated.”

All modern religions are fraudulent, Dan contends, not just the LDS Church. “Organized religion is hate masquerading as love. Which inevitably leads you back to the religion as it originally existed, before it was corrupted. It leads you to become a fundamentalist. You can see where the Church lost the answers by giving up its fundamental principles. So you find your beliefs evolving toward fundamentalism.

“But then I found out that there weren’t answers in fundamentalism, either. You see some of the same contradictions. Fortunately for me, I saw this about the time I came here to the monastery. That’s when everything started to slowly distill and come together.”

At the core of Dan’s transmogrified faith is his newfound conviction that he is Elijah, the biblical prophet known for his solitary ways and unyielding devotion to God. And as Elijah, Dan is certain, it will be his job to announce the Second Coming of Christ in the Final Days. According to Dan, “In my role as Elijah, I’m like John the Baptist. Elijah means ‘forerunner,” the one who prepares the way. John the Baptist prepared the way for the First Advent of Christ. I’m here to prepare the way for the return of the Son of Man.“

Dan believes, as he did when he was a fundamentalist Mormon, that the most salient fact of existence is the immutable division of humankind into those who are inherently righteous and those who are inherently evil. “Some people were chosen to be children of God,” Dan explains, “and others became children of the devil. Either you’re a brother—a child of God—or an asshole—a child of the devil. And you can’t do anything to change it.

“There are two fathers, God and the devil. And all the children of God possess something none of the children of the devil possess, which is the gift of love. The devil could not program love into his children because love is something he doesn’t possess or understand. It’s beyond his knowledge. All the children of the devil possess is greed, hatred, envy, and jealousy.”

According to Dan, at a certain point Christ gathered all His children around Him and announced, “ ‘I want to have a party that’s gonna last for a thousand years. You interested? You want to party with Me on this earth for a thousand years?” And we said, “Hell, yeah!” So He said, “Okay, that’s the good part. Here’s the bad part: you can’t have something for nothing… For six thousand years I’m gonna let the earth become hell before I turn it into heaven. And hell, by definition, is where the devil and his children are running shit. So what I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna let the devil populate the earth with all of his assholes, and then I’m gonna sprinkle you, My children, on the earth a few at a time. And every hour you spend in this hell-on-earth with the assholes, you’re going to be building up credits for the Big Party. It’s gonna take about six thousand years, but by then we’ll have all the credits we’ll need for our party. And then I’ll come, and we’ll harvest the earth—basically, we’ll remove all the assholes—and clear the dance floor for our thousand-year party’

“Christ told His children, ”I know life is fucking crazy, but I’m here to tell you there’s a purpose behind it. We’re working for the Kingdom of God. And the way we do that is we just put in our time here. And every hour you put in here is building up credit for the Big Party. That’s the promise. That’s the covenant. It’s going to be crazy down there for a while, but in the end, through Elijah, I will come.“ ”