Paperback: Almost everyone in Utah County has heard of the Lafferty boys. That's mostly a function of the lurid murders, of course, but the Lafferty surname had a certain prominence in the county even before Brenda and Erica Lafferty were killed. Watson Lafferty, the patriarch of the clan, was a chiropractor who ran a thriving practice out of his home in downtown Provo's historic quarter. He and his wife, Claudine, had six boys and two girls, in whom they instilled an unusually strong work ethic and intense devotion to the Mormon Church. The entire family was admired for its industriousness and probity.
Allen - the youngest of the Lafferty children, now in his mid-forties - works as a tile setter, a trade he has plied since he was a teenager. In the summer of 1984, he was living with his twenty-four-year-old wife and baby daughter in American Fork, a sleepy, white-bread suburb alongside the freeway that runs from Provo to Salt Lake City.
Brenda, his spouse, was a onetime beauty queen recognized around town from her tenure as the anchor of a newsmagazine program on channel 11, the local PBS affiliate. Although she had abandoned her nascent broadcasting career to marry Allen and start a family, Brenda had lost none of the exuberance that had endeared her to television viewers. Warm and outgoing, she'd made a lasting impression.
On the morning of 24 July 1984, Allen left their small duplex apartment before the sun was up and drove eighty miles up the interstate to work at a construction site east of Ogden. During his lunch break, he phoned Brenda, who catted with him for a minute before putting their fifteen-month-old daughter, Erica, on the line. Erica gurgled a few words of baby talk; then Brenda told her husband everything was fine and said goodbye.
Allen arrived home around eight that evening, tired from the long workday. He walked up to the front door and was surprised to find it locked; they almost never locked their doors. He used his key to enter, and then was surprised again by the baseball game blaring from the television in the living room. Neither he nor Brenda liked baseball - they never watched it. After he'd turned off the TV, the apartment seemed preternaturally quiet to him, as though nobody was home. Allen figured Brenda had taken the baby and gone out.
"I turned to go and see if maybe she was at the neighbours'," he explained later, "and I noticed some blood near the door on a light switch." And then he saw Brenda in the kitchen, sprawled on the floor in a lake of blood.
Upon calling Brenda's name and getting no reply, he knelt beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. "I touched her," he said, "and her body felt cool. There was blood on her face and pretty much everywhere."
Allen reached for the kitchen phone which was resting on the floor next to his wife, and dialed 911 before he realized there was no dial tone. The cord had been yanked from the wall. As he walked to their bedroom to try the extension int here, he glanced into the baby's room and saw Erica slumped over in her crib in an odd position, motionless. She was wearing nothing but a diaper, which was soaked with blood, as were the blankets surrounding her.
Allen hurried to the master bedroom only to find the phone in there out of order as well so he went next door to a neighbour's apartment, where he was finally able to call for help. He described the carnage to the 911 dispatcher then called his mother.
While he waited for the police to show up, Allen returned to his apartment. "I went to Brenda and I prayed," he said. "And then as I stood, I surveyed the situation a little more, and realized that there had been a grim struggle." For the first time he noticed that the blood wasn't confined to the kitchen: it smeared the living room walls, the floor, the doors, the curtains. It was obvious to him who was responsible. He'd known the moment he'd first seen Brenda on the kitchen floor.
Renowned for his insightful portrayals of lives conducted on the outer limits, the bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer, has shifted his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief.
Under The Banner Of Heaven (2003) is a riveting account of Taliban-like theocracies in the American heartland, controlled by renegade Mormon prophets. At its core is an appalling double murder committed by a pair of brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they were commanded to kill by God.
Working from a meticulously researched account of this divinely inspired crime, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of polygamy, savage violence and unyielding faith: a clear-eyed and compelling work of non-fiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behaviour.
It is also "a provocative look at the twisted roots of American fundamentalism" or a brand of religion known as Mormon Fundamentalism (FLDS). LDS Church authorities bristle visibly when Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are even mentioned in the same breath. As Gordon B Hinckley, the then-eighty-eight-year-old LDS president and prophet, emphasized during a 1998 television interview on Larry King Live, "They have no connection with us whatever. They don't belong to the church. There are actually no Mormon Fundamentalists."
It is the aim of this book to cast some light on Lafferty and his ilk and the devastating effect of the practice of polygamy which is abusive to young girls, women and society. If trying to understand such people is a daunting exercise, it also seems a useful one - for what it may tell us about the roots of brutality, perhaps, but even more for what might be learned about the nature of faith.
About the author: Son of a doctor and amateur mountaineer, Jon Krakauer was born on 12 April 1954, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and grew up in Oregon, where he began mountain-climbing at eight years old. After graduating from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1976, Krakauer worked as a carpenter and a commercial fisherman in Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska, devoting most of his free time to climbing.
In 1977 he pioneered a new route up the Devils Thumb in southeast Alaska, and in 1996 he reached the top of Mt. Everest, though four of his five teammates died on the descent down the mountain - an experience Krakauer would write about for Outside magazine and in his book Into Thin Air.
Jon Krakauer is a journalist whose work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, Architectural Digest, and other periodicals. Some of Krakauer's essays and articles on mountain-climbing were collected in his first book, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains, published in 1990. His next book, Into the Wild (1996), became a bestseller and was adapted in 2007 as a feature film directed by Sean Penn.
Into Thin Air (1997), Krakauer's third book, investigates the commercialization of the world's highest mountain, Everest. It reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into twenty-four languages. It also was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize and was named Book of the Year by Time magazine.
His other books include Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), about the Mormon church, which inspired the 2006 documentary Damned to Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009), about an All-Pro NFL football player and U.S. Army Ranger killed in Afghanistan.
In 1999 Jon Krakauer received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is editor of the Modern Library's Exploration series.
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