Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  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 naïveté 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.

  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.*

  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.

  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.”*

  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:

&nb
sp; 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.