Under the Banner of Heaven (24 page)

When Brenda disobeyed Allen, or her assertiveness embarrassed him in front of his brothers, he was apt to berate her with uncontrollable fury. Other times he vented his anger by beating her. One night toward the end of winter in 1984, Betty Wright McEntire was awakened after midnight by a frantic phone call from Brenda. “She told me to meet her at a McDonald’s halfway between Salt Lake and American Fork, where she and Allen lived,” Betty remembers. “I asked what was wrong, and she goes, ”I just need to talk to you.“ So I got out of bed and drove down there.

“When I got to the McDonald’s she told me, ”I’m leaving him.“ I said, ”What?! I had no idea things were that bad.“ She said, ”Well, I’ve been secretly saving some money, and I’m going to go live with Grandpa and Grandma in Montana. I’ll get a job there and take care of the baby on my own.“ ”

But immediately after this meeting with her sister, Brenda changed her mind and stayed with Allen, which raises the question, Why? Especially after she had been so resolute in urging Dianna Lafferty to leave Ron. “How come Brenda didn’t split? Because she loved Allen,” Betty explains, “and she wasn’t one to quit. He was the father of her baby girl. She wanted it to work. She really thought she could save him from his brothers. She was a very determined woman.”

Betty makes a painful confession, however. When Brenda confided to her at McDonald’s under the cruel fluorescent glare that she was leaving Allen, Betty reflexively admonished, “But you can’t! You’re married now. If things are bad, you just need to work them out!” At the time, Betty says, she didn’t have “a clue that he was beating her, and I didn’t know any of the stuff about the School of the Prophets; we only learned about it after her death, when we read her journals. My mom and dad were always there for her, but she didn’t tell us what was really going on. Because if there was any way my dad would have known, he would have driven down and taken her and the baby back to Idaho, where they would have been safe, no question.”

One Sunday morning about two months after Brenda met Betty in the middle of the night at McDonald’s, LaRae Wright, the women’s mother, says she received a very disturbing phone call from Brenda: “She was in a panic. She said, ”Things aren’t going well with Allen. Can I come home?“ We said, ”Of course!“ Well, then we didn’t hear back from her, so I called her that evening and she said, ”We’ve worked things out.“ So she didn’t come to Idaho, after all. I don’t know what was going on, but she never came home.”

By then, Ron and Dan were long gone from Provo and Utah County, driving around the West in Ron’s Impala wagon on their impromptu pilgrimage to polygamist communities. “We traveled up into Canada, down through the western U.S., and across the Midwest,” Dan recalls. “As I look back at it now, it was an important trip for me because I got to know my brother for the first time, really. Until then, I never knew Ron all that well. He’s six years older than me. We were never that close as kids. We all looked up to him, and I wanted to be close to him, but we just didn’t have the opportunity.”

Day after day, taking turns at the wheel, Ron and Dan rolled across the continent in the old Chevrolet. At times they would drive for hours without speaking, simply gazing up at the massive thunderheads that boiled forty thousand feet into the afternoon sky, transforming the plains into a vast, shifting checkerboard of shadow and dazzling sunlight. More often the brothers talked, and when they did it was with passionate intensity. Usually the topic of conversation was the removal revelation.

In the revelation’s second sentence, God had told Ron, “It is My will and commandment that ye remove the following individuals in order that My work might go forward.” Brenda and Erica Lafferty, Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe needed to be killed, God said, because “they have truly become obstacles in My path and I will not allow My work to be stopped.” Understanding “My work” to mean building the City of Refuge, Ron began to tell Dan of “a great slaughter that was to take place” before the construction could commence.

Sitting in a small cinder-block room deep in the bowels of the maximum-security unit at Point of the Mountain, Dan tilts his head back and gazes blankly at the ceiling, letting details from that eventful summer bubble back up into his consciousness. The road trip stretched into weeks, then months, and as the length of the trip increased, Dan remembers, “I noticed my brother getting more and more agitated—it seemed like he was becoming more bloodthirsty, really. He started saying things like, ”It’s gonna happen soon.“ And eventually he began to focus on a particular date that the removals should be carried out. After a while he said, ”I think the twenty-fourth of July is when it’s going to happen.“

“As I observed Ron going through these changes—and the things he was saying were really freaking me out—all I could do was pray. I asked God, ”Look, you know I will do whatever you want me to do. Should I stay with my brother and carry this thing out? Or should I separate from him and have nothing more to do with this?“ But the answer I got was to stay with Ron.”

A few times during their trip, Ron and Dan decided to separate for a week or two. At one point Ron hopped a freight train east, while Dan took the Impala and kept to a different itinerary. Dan arrived at their rendezvous site in Wichita, Kansas, in mid-June, several days before Ron. While he waited for his brother to show up, he got a job as a day laborer through the local employment office, tearing down an old bank. During his brief tenure on this project, Dan met a twenty-four-year-old named Ricky Knapp who was wielding a shovel on the same demolition crew.

According to Dan, he and Knapp “became good friends. He had just gotten out of jail, and we had some good conversations. And I really liked him.” After his release, Knapp had found himself without a roof over his head, so Dan invited Knapp to stay with him in the back of the Impala, and Knapp accepted. When Ron arrived in Wichita soon thereafter, Knapp decided to join the brothers for the remainder of their road trip.

Knapp had an associate who was a small-time marijuana farmer.

One afternoon before they left Wichita, Knapp took Dan to a field outside of town where this farmer had thrown away the “shake” from his most recent harvest—the leaves and stems discarded after the resinous buds had been trimmed and packaged for sale. Knapp and Dan filled a grocery bag with this poor-grade weed and stashed it in the Impala. It was foul stuff, Dan recalls, “but you could get a low-level buzz after smoking four or five big joints.”

This wasn’t the first time Dan had smoked marijuana; he had actually been introduced to it fifteen years earlier. Ironically, it was the “Word of Wisdom”—Section 89 of
The Doctrine and Covenants,
famously prohibiting Mormons from using tobacco and “strong drink”—that had first aroused Dan’s curiosity about pot. Specifically, his interest was piqued by verse 10 of the revelation, which reads, “Verily I say unto you, all wholesome herbs God hath ordained for the constitution, nature, and use of man.”

Dan had occasion to satisfy his curiosity in 1969 when he returned from his mission and took a construction job in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Among the folks he worked with, he says, were “a lot of people who smoked pot… and although I wouldn’t try it myself, I was observant and analytical of them and their practices, and I asked a lot of questions, which soon gave me the impression that there was some big lie being perpetuated about this stuff.” Eventually a girl he had a crush on in Colorado convinced him to sample some high-potency dope, he remembers: “I was launched into my first orbit into the expanded universe inside my head.”

Dan smoked pot a few more times during that period of his young adulthood, but he worried that he was committing a sin, and when he moved from Colorado back to Utah County he “repented and became a hundred and ten percent Mormon again.”* Dan didn’t smoke any more marijuana until he met Ricky Knapp in the summer of 1984, at which point, he says, “I felt I was having my heart and mind opened to something much more mysterious and serious than I had ever imagined.” As he reflected on the various references to herbs in Joseph’s published revelations, Dan became convinced that the prophet “must have come across some of the mind-expanding herbs.”

*Interestingly, in 1915 Utah became the first state in the Union to criminalize marijuana. The impetus for the ban came from the LDS Church, which was concerned about increasing marijuana use among its members. Latter-day Saints, it turns out, were way ahead of the curve when it came to smoking dope, thanks to polygamists who’d developed a taste for cannabis in Mexico, where some six thousand of them had fled by the early years of the twentieth century to escape federal prosecution. In the summer of 1912, the Mexican Revolution flared through northern Mexico, and the escalating violence compelled most of these expatriate polygamists to return ro Utah, where they introduced marijuana into the broader Mormon culture, alarming the LDS general authorities.

Unlike Dan, Ron had never tried marijuana before Ricky Knapp entered their lives, but after hooking up with Dan and Knapp in Wichita, Ron was easily persuaded to smoke some of Knapp’s low-grade cannabis. According to Dan, Ron thereby “got to feel what a mild high was like, and to experience the munchies. It was probably rather fortuitous [that the marijuana was so weak] because he was a little fearful at first, and later on, when we got good stuff to smoke, he tended to get pretty paranoid.” Paranoid or not, Ron quickly adopted Dan’s view that marijuana enhanced one’s “spiritual enlightenment.”

When Dan became reacquainted with marijuana through his association with Knapp, he says that because he was no longer under the thumb of the LDS Church, “for the first time I was able to get high with a clear conscience, and perhaps that is why, rather than just experiencing ‘the gladdening of the heart,” I began to experience the ’enlivening of the soul.“ I began to have what I would call wonderful spiritual insights.” Getting baked, Dan observed, was “much like becoming a child and being introduced into a whole new world… I’ve concluded that the scripture which says, ”Unless you become like a little child, you can’t see the Kingdom of Heaven‘ is another secret reference to getting high; as is also the mysterious account of Moses seeing God through the burning bush.“*

*After Dan and Ron were arrested, Dan made a statement from jail in praise of “spirit herbs,” which was widely publicized. “Because of that statement,” Dan says, “many people have wondered if I was on drugs or drunk when I did the killings, but neither was the case. I had smoked some good bud with my third wife about a week earlier… and I drank a beer Alex Joseph bought me the day I left his compound in Big Water on about July 22”; but that, he insists, was the full extent to which he used intoxicants during the period leading up to the murders.

After their contretemps with the School of the Prophets in April 1984 but before leaving Utah on their road trip, Ron and Dan had paid a visit to the directors of the Dream Mine in order to discuss the City of Refuge they intended to build near the mine entrance. This was their second visit to the directors: a couple of months earlier, Dan had offered to donate the labor of all six Lafferty brothers to help extract the gold everybody knew was close at hand, in order to finance the City of Refuge, but the managers of the mine had politely declined the offer. This time, Ron and Dan dispensed with all niceties and flat-out demanded that the directors turn over management of the mine to them; if they refused, Ron warned, the directors “would feel the hand of the Lord.” Ignoring the threat of divine retribution, the mine managers declined this offer as well, albeit less politely this time around.

Despite being rebuffed in their efforts to take control of the Dream Mine and being expelled from the School of the Prophets, Ron and Dan remained excited about building the City of Refuge on Onias’s property below the mine. Toward this end, during their road trip they sought out a number of preeminent polygamists across the West and attempted to enlist their support for the project—among them John W. Bryant, the self-proclaimed prophet Ron had visited the previous December. After leaving Wichita at the beginning of July, Ron, Dan, and Ricky Knapp steered the Impala west, aiming for Bryant’s commune amid the tall fir trees and lush berry farms of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Upon their arrival there, Ron electrified Bryant’s followers with an impromptu sermon about the City of Refuge and the role it would play during the Last Days. According to one of these postulants, Laurene Grant, Ron “just had so much to love. Everyone picked up on it. Everyone just started to bubble.” Grant, a mother of four children, was also impressed with Dan, who used his chiropractic skills to treat members of the commune. She compared Dan to Christ, saying, “He was just so gentle and so loving.”

By the time the Laffertys bid farewell to Bryant’s group and the damp charms of the Pacific Northwest, Dan had taken Grant as his third wife. The newlyweds and her two youngest children drove away together in Grant’s car, while Ron, her two older sons, and Knapp departed in the Impala. They agreed to meet in two weeks, at the Confederated States of the Exiled Nation of Israel—the Utah compound of Alex Joseph, one of America’s best-known polygamists. Joseph, six or seven of his wives, and their many children lived in Big Water, a faded desert settlement near the southwestern end of Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the nation.* Big Water happened to be not terribly far from Colorado City, the stronghold of Uncle Roy’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—the most populous polygamist sect in the nation.

*Joseph, a former police officer from Modesto, California, was raised in the Greek Orthodox faith and converted to Mormonism in 1965. Excommunicated four years later when he began taking plural wives, he founded a sect called the Church of Jesus Christ in Solemn Assembly. (All told, Joseph married at least twenty-one women.) His self-deprecating wit, idiosyncratic theological views, and insatiable appetite for publicity made him a darling of the international news media. In 1983, shortly before the Laffertys visited him, Joseph successfully ran for mayor of Big Water on a Libertarian platform, promising that he would turn the town into a tax-free sanctuary; thereafter he boasted that he was the only polygamist elected to public office in the United States (he was also commander of the Lake Powell Coast Guard Auxiliary). Late in life he came to believe that Jesus had been a visionary seaman and was crucified by the Romans after He discovered the secret of transoceanic navigation. A prodigious smoker, Joseph died in 1998 of colon cancer at the age of sixty-two.