Under the Banner of Heaven

by Jon Krakauer

  It was during this crisis that Dianna, on behalf of her sisters-in-law, asked Ron to visit with his brothers and straighten them out. “Ron was really vulnerable right then,” Weiss explains. “Dianna told me at the time that Ron was so upset he would regularly just break down and cry. She'd tell him, ‘Ron, don't worry about it; we can start over. We did it once, we'll do it again.' But he'd just look at her and say, ‘We've sacrificed too much. I can't bear losing it all.'

  “And just then Dan came along,” Weiss declares with anguish in her voice. Dan's religious ideas included a message that Ron found particularly comforting during that difficult period. “Dan convinced Ron that God didn't want us to have material things, that it was good to lose everything. Dan told him that he had a higher calling. That God intended for Ron to be a missionary for the things Dan was teaching. And Ron really believed it—all of it. In fact, he even quit his job. Dan said it was all going to be okay, because he—Ron—was going to be called as the next president and prophet of the LDS Church, that Dan would be made his first counselor, and that the four other Lafferty boys would be made second counselors.”

  Very soon after Ron was converted to Dan's brand of fundamentalism, he instructed Dianna to begin following the onerous rules set forth in The Peace Maker. “I went over to their house one day,” Weiss remembers, “and Dianna was shaking and shaking a gallon jug full of cream. I asked her, ‘What in the world are you doing?' She said, ‘Ron wants me to make our own butter from now on.'

  “This was just one little example of how Ron expected her to live. Basically he expected her to be his slave. And it was such a complete reversal from the way he'd been. Before Dan brainwashed him, Ron had treated Dianna like a queen. He was just one of the nicest men I've ever known. But when this happened, he became one of the meanest men I've ever known.

  “Dianna could see right away that the changes in Ron were a really bad thing, and I've never seen a woman work harder at trying to save a man. She would stay up most of the night trying to talk sense into him. In the hope of bringing him around and saving him, she tried to remain on his good side by going along with some of his crazy demands. But she was only willing to go so far, and then she'd have to say, ‘No, Ron, this just isn't right.' ”

  As Ron became more controlling and more extreme, Dianna slowly lost hope that she could change Ron back into the loving father and considerate husband she'd known previously. He began to talk with growing enthusiasm about polygamy, which made her sick to even contemplate. When Ron announced that he intended to marry off their teenage daughters as plural wives, Dianna reached her breaking point. Desperate, she turned for help to Weiss and other close friends, to leaders of her LDS ward, and especially to Brenda Lafferty—who was married to Allen, the youngest of the six Lafferty brothers.

  After Dan persuaded his brothers to adopt his fundamentalist beliefs, all their wives acquiesced and submitted, to one degree or another, to the humiliations decreed in The Peace Maker—all their wives, that is, except one: Brenda Wright Lafferty. Intelligent, articulate, and assertive, “Brenda stood up to those Lafferty boys,” says her mother, LaRae Wright. “She was probably the youngest of the wives, but she was the strong one. She told the other wives to stand up for their rights and to think for themselves. And she set an example by refusing to go along with Allen's demands. She told him in no uncertain terms that she didn't want him doing things with his brothers. And the brothers blamed her for that, for keeping their family apart. The Lafferty boys didn't like Brenda, because she got in their way.”

  Brenda was the second oldest of seven children raised by LaRae, a schoolteacher, and Jim Wright, an agronomist. Born in Logan, Utah, Brenda moved with her family to Ithaca, New York, when she was just a year old, in order for her father to obtain his doctorate at Cornell University. Jim and LaRae pined for the wide-open country of the Rocky Mountain West, but upstate New York was not without appeal, and there was a major attraction just up the road from Ithaca: Palmyra, the birthplace of their LDS faith. As soon as he received his Ph.D., however, Jim moved his family back to the West—to Twin Falls, Idaho, an agricultural town forty miles north of the Utah state line, where Brenda enjoyed a storybook childhood.

  “She was outgoing, full of life, and had a lot of personality,” says her older sister, Betty Wright McEntire. “Brenda was just real fun. We were best friends.” Popular, active in school government, and a member of the drill team, Brenda was an ambitious student who excelled at almost everything she tried. She was also beautiful, in the wholesome, all-American farm-girl idiom: in 1980 she was first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant.

  After graduating from high school with honors, Brenda enrolled at the University of Idaho, where she was elected president of her sorority. “But,” says her mother, “that wasn't the kind of life she wanted to lead, so she came back home to Twin Falls and went to the College of Southern Idaho for two years, then transferred to Brigham Young University.” While attending BYU, Brenda joined a “young adult ward”—an LDS student congregation—where she met Allen Lafferty. “Allen wasn't a student, but for some reason he started attending that student ward in Provo,” LaRae explains. “He had a lot of charisma, they hit it off, and they just started going together.”

  “When Brenda started going out with Allen, I was out of the country, on a mission in Argentina,” her sister Betty says. “But she wrote to me every week, and I could tell she was pretty serious about this guy. She'd dated a lot of boys before, but she never got stuck on any one person. Allen was different. He was a returned missionary, and the Laffertys were the picture-perfect LDS family. Everybody in Provo seemed to know them. Plus, Allen is a charmer—all the Lafferty boys have this ability to charm the socks off you. They have this look in their eyes. And Brenda fell for it. Even from Argentina it was obvious she was really in love with Allen.” On April 22, 1982, Allen and Brenda were sealed for time and eternity as husband and wife in the Salt Lake City temple. She was twenty-one years old.

  At BYU, where Brenda majored in communications, she anchored a television newsmagazine program on KBYU—the local PBS affiliate broadcast throughout Utah on channel 11. According to Betty, “Her ambition was to become an anchorwoman like Michelle King.* We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them—that we shouldn't go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities.

  “Then Brenda got married, and Allen didn't want her to work, so she kind of put her broadcasting career on the shelf temporarily, and took a lower-profile job at Castleton's, one of the nicer stores at the Orem Mall, just to get insurance and help support the family. But Allen started pressuring her to quit that job, too, because he wanted her to be a traditional, subservient wife. He wanted her to be totally reliant on him.”

  According to LaRae, “Brenda really wanted a career in broadcast journalism. We found out later, after the fact, that she had been offered a job at BYU, teaching in the communications department. Allen wouldn't let her take it, though, so she became a housewife. It's clear from her journals that within about two months after marrying Allen, she realized she had made a mistake. But then she got pregnant with Erica.”

  “When Allen first became part of our family,” says Betty, “there was this instant attachment. We all liked him. He was like a wonderful big brother to us. At the time, we had no idea that there was all this other stuff going on in his family. Then we started to notice how fanatical they all were.”

  Betty remembers visiting Brenda and Allen one night when her sister was pregnant with Erica: “Brenda wanted to go out and get something to eat, but Allen wouldn't patronize any restaurant that stayed open on Sundays. So we drove around from place to place, and Allen would make us sit in the car while he went in to find out if they were open on Sundays. Each place was, so he wouldn't let us eat there. After a while, Brenda and I got so frustrated we just asked him to take us home.

  “Allen had a very suc
cessful tile business, but he insisted on always being paid in cash. He didn't believe in having a checking account, because he didn't want the IRS to be able to trace his income. He didn't want to have a Social Security card. None of this came out until after they got married.

  “We started noticing that Allen was always trying to get around the law. When it came time to pay taxes that first year after they got married, Allen told Brenda that he wasn't going to pay them. She said, ‘Oh yes, we are! That's what you do. You honor the law!' When Allen refused, she had our dad help her prepare the taxes for them. I remember when the car registration came due, Allen wouldn't let Brenda go get it registered. She told him, ‘Yes I am, because I don't want to get a ticket!' They had a big fight about it. We just weren't raised like that. So she always made sure to do the things they were supposed to: she paid the taxes, renewed the licenses, those kinds of things. She resisted Allen as much as she could.

  “But then the baby got sick and he wouldn't let Brenda take Erica to the doctor. And it just kept getting worse and worse.”

  Allen's father, Watson Lafferty Sr., had long been afflicted with diabetes, which he refused to treat with insulin. In late 1983, after he and Claudine had returned from their mission and were again living in the family home in Provo, Watson's diabetes took a sharp turn for the worse. His sons continued to refuse medical treatment for him, however. Their herbal and homeopathic remedies failed to alleviate the illness, and he died. “The whole family seemed evil to Brenda by then,” says Betty. “Then and there she could tell something really bad was going on with them.”

  Life was growing more horrific for Dianna Lafferty, too. Her home in Highland was just a few minutes away from the small apartment where Allen, Brenda, and their baby were living in American Fork. Overwhelmed and desperate, Dianna turned to Brenda for help. Although Brenda held stubbornly to her belief that she could turn Allen around, she was convinced that Ron was too far gone, and that he would never abandon his fanatical ideas. Both Ron and Dan had been excommunicated from the LDS Church. Ron no longer had a job. He was increasingly abusive to Dianna, and talked with ever greater fervor about taking plural wives. Brenda urged Dianna to divorce Ron, for her children's sake and her own.

  Leaving Ron was all but unthinkable for Dianna. As she later explained to the Utah County prosecutor, she had six children, hadn't graduated from college, had never held a job, and possessed no marketable skills. “I can't even type,” she confessed in despair. But at her core she knew Brenda was right: leaving Ron was imperative. Relying on Brenda, close friends, and members of the Highland LDS ward, Dianna summoned enough courage to initiate divorce proceedings.

  The divorce was finalized in the autumn of 1983. Around Thanksgiving Dianna packed up the kids and moved to Florida, putting as much space as she could between her and the Lafferty boys. Even though he'd had every opportunity to see it coming, the departure of his wife and children came as a stunning blow to Ron. Despondent at the prospect of Christmas without them, he planned to spend the holidays far from Utah, where he was reminded of his missing family everywhere he turned. Ron decided to visit a colony of polygamists near Woodburn, Oregon, headed by a charismatic figure named John W. Bryant.

  Before landing in Woodburn (a farm town just north of Salem, the Oregon state capital), Bryant had established polygamist settlements in Utah, California, and Nevada. Like so many other renegade prophets, he had on occasion asserted that he was the “one mighty and strong” but he differed from his fundamentalist brethren in some unusual aspects. Bryant was a libertine by temperament, and his teachings emphasized experimentation with drugs and group sex—homosexual as well as heterosexual—proclivities seldom acknowledged by other Mormon Fundamentalists.

  Such scandalous behavior was completely new to Ron, who was both enthralled and taken aback by what he saw during his extended visit to Bryant's commune. When one of the prophet's wives let Ron know she found him attractive, Ron was extremely tempted to hop into bed with her, but he worried that doing so might make Bryant jealous and angry, so he left and returned to Utah.

  Ron arrived back in the Provo area just after Bernard Brady had introduced Dan to Prophet Onias, the Canadian fundamentalist. Dan in turn introduced Onias to Ron and the other Lafferty brothers, and very soon thereafter, Ron, Dan, Mark, Watson, and Tim Lafferty were inducted into Onias's School of the Prophets. Allen, the youngest sibling, was eager to participate as well, but Brenda put her foot down. “She refused to let Allen join,” LaRae Wright confirms.

  Although standing up to Allen meant standing up to the entire Lafferty clan, Brenda did not shy away from such confrontations. Not only was she quite willing to argue theology with the Lafferty brothers, she possessed an impressive command of LDS scripture that allowed her to more than hold her own when debating fundamentalist doctrine with Ron and Dan. They came to despise her for defying them and for her influence over Allen, whom they considered “pussy-whipped.”

  When Ron's father was dying of diabetes, Ron had called a family meeting to discuss the funeral and other details. Allen brought Brenda to the meeting, which made Ron furious. He called her a bitch and worse, and berated her with such unrestrained spleen that Brenda finally left in tears. But she did not remain intimidated very long.

  “Brenda was the only one of the Lafferty wives who was educated,” Betty points out. “And her education was what they were afraid of. Because Brenda was confident in her beliefs, and her sense of right and wrong, and she wasn't about to let anyone take that away from her. She felt it was her duty to defend the other women. She was their only hope.” Reflecting on the load her little sister had shouldered, Betty pauses before continuing: “At that point she was still just twenty-three years old. To be that young, and to be surrounded by all these older people who were supposed to be more mature than she was—yet she was the one who they turned to.” Betty pauses again. “My sister was an amazing woman.”

  Although Brenda managed to keep Allen from joining Onias's School of the Prophets, she could not prevent him from associating with Dan and his other brothers. “But she tried to keep a watchful eye on him,” says Betty. “Around this time my little sister, Sharon, and I went to visit Brenda and Allen. While we were there, Brenda made sure that whenever Allen went anywhere, either Sharon or I went with him. Then when we'd get home she'd question us about where he went, and who he talked to. At the time I thought that was kind of weird. Now I see that she was just trying to keep tabs on how much he was talking to his brothers.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE ONE MIGHTY AND STRONG

  As a religious city-state under tight control, Nauvoo was a haven where the followers of Joseph Smith had their most important choices—what they should do to serve God—made for them . . . , and their identity as God's chosen people was assured through him. . . .

  As is common in such situations, the threat of evil was projected onto others. . . . Hence, at Nauvoo the innocent children of God realized their identity through their struggle against the evil followers of Satan, who dominated American society everywhere except in the city of the Saints.

  The problem, of course, with this kind of dichotomous myth is that, for the people who hold it, guilt and innocence become matters of belief, not evidence.

  JOHN E. HALLWAS AND ROGER D. LAUNIUS,

  CULTURES IN CONFLICT

  When the Utah businessman and Dream Mine supporter Bernard Brady brought Prophet Onias and the Lafferty brothers (minus Allen) together one crisp fall evening near the end of 1983, it seemed to all who were present to be an especially auspicious union. There was an instant feeling of kinship and shared values, and the men talked excitedly until “the wee hours of the morning,” according to Onias. Giddy with their sense of divinely empowered mission, everyone at the gathering was convinced that, collectively, they were destined to alter the course of human history.

  “Five of the six brothers,” Onias said, “became extremely enthusiastic when they realized that we had just been given
a commandment by the Lord to send three sections of The Book of Onias to all the stake and ward authorities.”* He was referring to a revelation he'd received on November 26 of that year, in which God had commanded Onias to “prepare pamphlets to send out to the presidents of stakes and bishops of wards of My church”—the LDS Church—so that those who had committed fornication against Him would “be warned.” The pamphlet consisted of excerpts from Onias's collected revelations, cautioning the entire LDS leadership—from the president and putative prophet in Salt Lake City down to the bishop of every ward across North America—that God was extremely unhappy with the way they'd been running His One True Church.

  God was especially steamed, Onias explained, that modern Mormon leaders were blatantly defying some of the most sacred doctrines He had revealed to Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century. Most egregiously, the men at the helm of the church continued to sanction and zealously enforce the government's criminalization of plural marriage. And only slightly less disturbing, from Onias's perspective, was the blasphemy perpetrated by LDS President Spencer W. Kimball in 1978 when he decreed that black-skinned men should be admitted into the Mormon priesthood—a historic, earth-shaking turnabout in church policy widely applauded by those outside the church. God had revealed to Onias, however, that blacks were subhuman “beasts of the field, which were the most intelligent of all animals that were created, for they did walk upright as a man doeth and had the power of speech.”†

  According to the pamphlet, God had given Onias an earful about blacks being ordained as LDS priests:

  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. . . .