Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  “Now, when you read in the newspaper Mr. Lafferty had revelations from God to do something, it sounds like he's crazy,” Dr. Gardner admitted. But Ron didn't strike him as the least bit crazy, Gardner quickly added, when one considered that Ron's revelations occurred within the context of the School of the Prophets: a group of devout, like-minded individuals who regularly met to evaluate those revelations. “That is a very different thing,” Gardner said, “than the psychosis of somebody who believes that God is talking to them when they're schizophrenic. And the difference is this: These are six people who shared the same reality, doing the same thing; praying together, reading together, talking together, weighing whether these really came from God or not, whether they were genuine.

  “That's exactly the tradition of the Christian church,” Gardner asserted, in which people tried to determine whether spirits they encountered “were from God or not. It's a communal experience, the real world of six or seven people getting together, sharing the same ideas, talking about them in the real world. You do not find schizophrenics sitting in a group together talking about shared experiences.”

  If Ron wasn't insane—or at least no more insane than anyone else who believes in God—what was he? Why had the Lafferty brothers' religious beliefs turned them into ruthless killers? Dr. Gardner told the court that although Ron was not psychotic, he did exhibit the symptoms of a psychological affliction called narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD. According to DSM-IV, NPD is distinguished by

  a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy . . . , indicated by five (or more) of the following:

  1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance . . .

  2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

  3. Believes that he or she is “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people . . .

  4. Requires excessive admiration

  5. Has a sense of entitlement . . .

  6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

  7. Lacks empathy

  8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

  9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes

  Although narcissistic personality disorder was not even listed as a formal diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders before 1980, it has been estimated that 1 percent of the American population is afflicted with it; NPD is a disconcertingly common ailment. Indeed, to a noteworthy degree, narcissists fuel the cultural, spiritual, and economic engines of Western society, as Dr. Gardner readily acknowledged from the witness stand. “Many successful people are narcissistic,” he said, stressing that narcissism is especially prevalent among accomplished businessmen, attorneys, physicians, and academics. Such people have a sense of vast self-importance, Gardner explained, and believe “they're smarter and better than anybody else. They're willing to work incredible hours to provide confirmation to support their grandiose ideas.”

  As examples, Gardner cited some of his own colleagues at the University of Utah Medical School: “I can go through the school of medicine and just pick them out at the tops of many of the departments . . . they'll work three or four times as hard as anybody else. . . . So it can be adaptive in the sense of making them high performers. On the other hand, it really impairs their ability for intimacy and closeness, because they lack empathy, and can't understand the importance of other people's life experiences, so they'll work and ignore their wives and children because they're pursuing this grandiose vision of themselves, which may make them successful . . . but really impair their social and interpersonal interactions.”

  Grandiosity and lack of empathy, Dr. Gardner emphasized, were the hallmarks of NPD, and Ron Lafferty was nothing if not grandiose and emotionally cold. Ron had readily volunteered that Brenda's death had aroused in him no feelings whatsoever. And he'd insisted to one and all that he was an especially important person in the eyes of God—that God had anointed him, Ron Lafferty, the “one mighty and strong.”

  Although an exaggerated desire to mete out justice is not listed among the defining characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder in DSM-IV, it probably should be. Narcissists erupt with self-righteous indignation whenever they believe others are breaking rules, acting unfairly, or getting more than their fair share of the pie. They have no compunction about breaking the rules themselves, however, because they know they're special and the rules don't apply to them. In Ron's case, he was quick to castigate anyone he thought was behaving selfishly or unrighteously—indeed, in the case of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, he didn't hesitate to assume the role of judge, jury, and executioner. Yet nobody howled louder about unfair persecution when he was accused of moral, ethical, or legal lapses by others.

  When narcissists are confronted by people who disparage the legitimacy of their extravagant claims, they tend to react badly. They may plunge into depression—or become infuriated. As Gardner explained to the court, when narcissists are belittled or denigrated “they feel horrible. . . . They have this sense they're either grandiose, perfect, and beautiful people, or absolutely worthless. So if you challenge their grandiosity—these are the words in the diagnostic manual—‘They respond with humiliation or rage.' Their reaction to criticism is intense. And I think that is a characteristic that's very clearly demonstrated by Mr. Lafferty.”

  Gardner described Ron as “a man whose grandiose self had been severely challenged by divorce and by rejection by his community. He was excommunicated. And in those moments of sitting quietly and thinking, he came up with a set of ideas that gave him a sense of release and relief. They're logical. They may not be based in fact, but it has a logical quality, because it serves his purposes in a very logical way.”

  A skeptical Mike Esplin demanded, “It's logical for him?”

  “For him,” Dr. Gardner asserted. “Any psychiatrist looking at that would say this is a set of defenses he's using so he doesn't feel the pain of his loss so much. So he's created some ideas that are soothing to him. Many people looking at religion would say religion is a set of ideas created by people as a way to soothe them, because we live in a very uncertain and oftentimes tragic world.”

  Many people would also argue that virtually everyone who has introduced a new framework of religious beliefs to the world—from Jesus to Muhammad to Joseph Smith to Ron Lafferty—fits the diagnosis for narcissistic personality disorder. In the view of psychiatrists and psychologists, any individual who proclaims to be a prophet or guru—who claims to communicate with God—is, almost by default, mentally or emotionally unbalanced to some degree.* As William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience,

  There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion had been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy durin
g part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.

  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 good-bye 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 Utah Assistant Attorney General Michael Wims, six years after that conviction. “Yeah, sure, he's crazy. Crazy like a fox.”