Murder Among the Saints
By: Jon Krakauer
Tags: Polygamy, Fundamentalism, True Crime, Religion And Spirituality, Mormon

On January 15, 1985, immediately after Judge Bullock decreed that the remainder of Dan Lafferty’s life would unfold in captivity, he was taken to the state prison near Point of the Mountain in Draper, Utah, where a corrections officer cut his hair and sheared off his whiskers. When I interviewed Dan in prison a decade and a half later, Dan hadn’t shaved or cut his hair since he was locked up. His beard, wrapped with rubber bands into a stiff gray cable, descended to his belly. His hair had gone white and fanned across the back of his orange prison jumpsuit. Although he was fifty-four years old and crows’ feet furrowed the corners of his eyes, there was something unmistakably boyish about his countenance. His skin was so pale it seemed translucent.

A self-portrait Dan Lafferty sent me from prison

A crude tattoo of a spider web radiated from Dan’s left elbow, wrapping the crook of his arm in a jagged indigo lattice. His wrists were bound in handcuffs, and his shackled ankles were chained to a steel ring embedded in the concrete floor. On his otherwise bare feet were cheap rubber flip-flops. A large man, he cheerfully refferred to the prison’s maximum-security unit as “my monastery.”

Every morning a wake-up alarm echoed through the halls of the unit at 6:30, followed by a head-count. The door to his cell remained locked twenty hours a day. Even when it wasn’t locked, Dan said, “I’m almost always in my cell. The only time I leave is to shower or serve food — I have a job serving meals. But I don’t really associate with people that much. I try not to leave my cell more often than I absolutely have to. There are so many assholes in here. They get you caught up in their little dramas, and you end up having to fuck somebody up. And the next thing you know your privileges are taken away. I’ve got too much to lose. I’m in a really comfortable situation right now. I’ve got a really good cellie, and I don’t want to lose him.”

The cellmate Lafferty was referring to, of course, was Mark Hofmann. Although Hofmann by then had contempt for religion in general and Mormonism in particular, his atheism didn’t seem to be an issue in his friendship with Dan Lafferty — despite the fact that Dan remained, by his own proud characterization, a religious zealot. “My beliefs are irrelevant to my cellie,” Dan confirmed. “We’re special brothers all the same. We’re bound by the heart.”

Prior to Dan’s conviction, and for more than a decade afterwards, he steadfastly maintained that he was innocent of the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty. When he was arrested in Reno in August, 1984, he told the arresting officers, “You think I have committed a crime of homicide, but I have not.” Although he still maintained he was innocent of any crime, paradoxically, he no longer denied that he killed Brenda and Erica. When asked to explain how both these apparently contradictory statements can be true, he explained, “I was doing God’s will, which is not a crime.”

Lafferty wasn’t reticent about describing exactly what happened on July 24, 1984. He said that shortly after noon, he, Ron, and the two drifters who had been traveling with them, Ricky Knapp and Chip Carnes, drove to the apartment of his youngest brother, Allen, in American Fork, twenty minutes down the Interstate from where he is now imprisoned. Inside the brick duplex he found his 15-month-old niece, Erica, standing in her crib, smiling up at him. “I spoke to her for a minute,” Lafferty recalls. “I told her, ‘I’m not sure what this is all about, but apparently it’s God’s will that you leave this world; perhaps we can talk about it later.’” And then he ended her life with a ten-inch boning knife.

After dispatching Erica, he calmly walked into the kitchen and used the same knife to kill the baby’s mother. When I met with him seventeen years after committing these two murders, he insisted, very convincingly, that he had never felt any regret for the deed, or shame.

Like his older brother, Ron, Dan Lafferty was brought up as a pious Mormon. “I’ve always been interested in God and the Kingdom of God,” he said. “It’s been the center of my focus since I was a young child.” And he was certain God intended for him to kill Brenda and Erica Lafferty: “It was like someone had taken me by the hand that day and led me comfortably through everything that happened. Ron had received a revelation from God that these lives were to be taken. I was the one who was supposed to do it. And if God wants something to be done, it will be done. You don’t want to offend Him by refusing to do His work.”

The Utah State Prison South Complex. The maximum security unit where Mark Hofmann and Dan Lafferty were cellmates is near the left edge of this photo

The murders Dan Lafferty committed are shocking for a host of reasons, but no aspect of the crimes is more disturbing than his complete absence of remorse. How could an apparently sane, avowedly pious man kill a wonderful, widely admired woman and her innocent baby so viciously, without the barest flicker of emotion? Whence did he derive the moral justification? What filled him such certitude? Any attempt to answer such questions must plumb those murky sectors of the heart and head that prompt most of us to believe in God — and compel an impassioned few, predictably, to carry that irrational belief to its logical end.

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel and inhumane — as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout — there may no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to perhaps be expected after the events of September 11, 2001. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.

Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it will no doubt be with us forever after. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it consumes them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mt. Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that’s irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.

The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end — wealth, fame, eternal salvation — but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s world view, a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.

Faith is the very antithesis of reason. Spiritual devotion defies rational analysis. And when religious fanaticism supplants sound judgment, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Common sense is no match for the voice of God.