Under the Banner of Heaven (40 page)

According to Dan’s version of events—a narrative considered quite credible, for the most part, by almost everyone who has heard it—he was the one who cut not only Erica Lafferty’s throat but Brenda’s throat as well. Dan insists that Ron didn’t actually kill anybody. But even if Ron hadn’t wielded the murder weapon, Dan’s account clearly placed Ron inside the apartment when the killings happened. Furthermore, Dan now told—in sickening detail—how Ron had savagely beaten Brenda, ignoring her pleas for mercy, until her face had been transformed into a pulp of bloody, disfigured flesh. Dan’s vivid testimony left no doubt that both brothers were equally culpable for the American Fork murders. Once the jury had an opportunity to hear Dan’s testimony during the retrial, Ron would no longer be able to claim—as he had during his 1985 trial—that he’d known nothing about the murders.

The retrial was scheduled to commence in March 1996. Ron’s attorneys were left with just a single legal option in their attempt to save him from the firing squad: an insanity defense—the same defense they had wanted to use during the 1985 trial but Ron had forbidden them to employ. As the trial date approached, Ron continued to tell anyone who would listen that he wasn’t the least bit crazy, but this time he stopped short of actively preventing his lawyers from arguing to the court that he was insane.

Whether Ron lived or died would hinge entirely on whether a jury could be convinced that his religious beliefs—including his certainty that God had commanded the removal of Brenda and Erica Lafferty— were not only sincerely held but also so extreme as to be a delusional artifact of a diseased mind.

Such a defense would unavoidably raise the same difficult epistemo-logical questions that had come to the fore after the Tenth Circuit Court’s ruling in 1991: if Ron Lafferty were deemed mentally ill because he obeyed the voice of his God, isn’t everyone who believes in God and seeks guidance through prayer mentally ill as well? In a democratic republic that aspires to protect religious freedom, who should have the right to declare that one person’s irrational beliefs are legitimate and commendable, while another person’s are crazy? How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?

This, after all, is a country led by a born-again Christian, President George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil. The highest law officer in the land, Attorney General John Ashcroft, is a dyed-in-the-wool follower of a fundamentalist Christian sect—the Pentecostal Assemblies of God—who begins each day at the Justice Department with a devotional prayer meeting for his staff, periodically has himself anointed with sacred oil, and subscribes to a vividly apocalyptic worldview that has much in common with key millenarian beliefs held by the Lafferty brothers and the residents of Colorado City. The president, the attorney general, and other national leaders frequently implore the American people to have faith in the power of prayer, and to trust in God’s will. Which is precisely what they were doing, say both Dan and Ron Lafferty, when so much blood was spilled in American Fork on July 24, 1984.

During pretrial hearings, Ron’s behavior in the courtroom served to underscore his lawyers’ contention that he was mentally incompetent. He appeared with a cloth sign attached to the seat of his prison jumpsuit that read, EXIT ONLY; his attorneys explained that he wore the sign to ward off the angel Moroni, who Ron believed was an evil homosexual spirit trying to invade his body through his anus. He believed that this same sodomizing spirit had already taken possession of Judge Hansen’s body, which is why Ron made a point of shouting profanities at the judge and addressing him with such epithets as “Punky Brewster” and “fucking punk.”

The defense team would try to spare Ron’s life by calling as expert witnesses three psychiatrists and one psychologist who would testify that, after examining the defendant, they were utterly convinced that he was deranged. The prosecution, on the other hand, would attempt to have Ron executed by presenting one psychiatrist and three psychologists who would argue with no less conviction that Ron was quite sane and had known exactly what he was doing when he’d participated in the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

The first witness to appear was C. Jess Groesbeck, M.D., a psychiatrist who testified for the defense that Ron had slipped over the edge of sanity when his wife, Dianna, took their children and left him. “It’s clear,” said Dr. Groesbeck, “that he could not tolerate her loss,” triggering the onset of what Groesbeck alternately termed a “schizo-affective disorder” and a “delusional disorder.”

He based this diagnosis on the fact that Ron’s bizarre beliefs could not be “changed with reason” and “are so fantastic and so beyond any kind of rational acceptance by anyone in the culture, that they would be categorized as delusional.” When Dianna Lafferty left him, Dr. Groesbeck speculated, Ron suffered “a total loss of self-esteem or self-image,” which prompted him to compensate “by creating a new but unreal view of himself and the world.”

Mike Esplin, Ron’s lead attorney, asked Groesbeck, “Do you feel that based on your evaluations that these mental disorders affect his ability, his capacity to comprehend and appreciate the charges or allegations against him?”

“I do,” Groesbeck answered. “He can’t, number one, even evaluate the reality of, for example, the case the State has against him. And, number two, I think that even when he can hear a few of those facts, his delusional system is so strong… for example, he absolutely believes that every piece of evidence that has been brought up against him had been planted. And I think that’s a product of his delusional thinking. And because of that… in my opinion he does not meet the criteria of being able to appreciate the charges.”

The next defense witness, a clinical and forensic psychologist named Robert Howell, seconded Dr. Groesbeck’s opinion that Ron suffered from a delusional disorder, “a schizophrenic illness” that rendered him mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Esplin asked Dr. Howell if he had “seen evidence of delusion in Mr. Lafferty?”

Howell replied, “Oh, yes, clear back in 1985 and continuing on until now.” He pointed out that many of Ron’s delusions concerned “the State and the family”: Ron didn’t understand why he was being tried by the State instead of his own family. According to Dr. Howell, Ron considered the issue of his guilt or innocence to be “a family matter” that could best be resolved by having him “duke it out with Allen, the husband of the deceased woman.”

Dr. Howell went on to describe other delusional behaviors on Ron’s part: that he believed Moroni was trying to invade his body through his rectum; that he sometimes heard Christ speaking to him; that he heard a buzzing sound when spirits were present; and that he saw sparks shooting from his fingertips.

When it was the prosecution’s turn to make its case, however, the battery of expert witnesses the state put on the stand moved quickly to throw cold water on the notion that such behavior demonstrated that Ron was crazy or in any way unfit to stand trial.

The first of these experts was Noel Gardner, M.D., a psychiatrist affiliated with the University of Utah Medical School. Dr. Gardner admitted that Ron’s belief in “travelers,” evil spirits, reflector shields, and the like was due to “very odd, very strange ideas. The first time I read the defense memorandum describing them… I thought this man may have become psychotic in some way, because they sounded so strange. What is interesting, though, is in an in-depth exploration of where those ideas came from, and how he uses those ideas and thinks about them, it is very clear to me they are not psychotic ideas… [They are] very consistent with things he’s learned as a child.”

Gardner explained that Ron described “travelers” as being spiritual entities with the ability to “inhabit different bodies at different times.” Gardner pointed out that this belief wasn’t really very different from the notion of reincarnation, and that Ron simply “used some very unusual labels” for a “rather conventional set of ideas. There are millions, literally, probably billions of people who believe in a spirit world.”

Ron “talks about what he calls reflector shields,” Dr. Gardner testified, “warding off or defending against evil forces. And in talking about that, it has the quality that might suggest a psychotic, paranoid set of ideas.” But, Gardner continued, Ron actually “describes these forces in very much the same kind of language that ordinary religious people would. For example, I asked him how these spirits were alike or different than the idea of guardian angels, and I said I grew up in a family where we believe in guardian angels.”

Ron responded that his “reflector shields” were very much like guardian angels, which struck Dr. Gardner as “very non-psychotic.” It seemed to him to be nearly identical to the ordinary Christian concept of erecting defenses “against the temptations or influences of Satan. It’s not all that different in many ways than a common New Testament text… And it’s real clear that many of his ideas have come from his early Mormon religious teachings.”

Prodding Dr. Gardner to continue in this vein, Utah Assistant Attorney General Creighton Horton asked him, “Are people who believe in divine guidance, or believe God sends guardian angels to protect us, mentally ill?”

“I would hope not,” Gardner replied. “Certainly, the majority of people in our country believe in God. Most people in our country say they pray to God. It’s a common experience. And while the labels that Mr. Lafferty uses are certainly unusual, the thought forms themselves are really very common… to all of us.”

Horton: “From what the defendant told you, does the defendant say that he thinks travelers can enter humans?”

Gardner: “Yes, he does believe that travelers can enter humans.”

Horton: “Is there a Judeo-Christian parallel to that?”

Gardner: “The idea that Christians should pray to have the Holy Spirit fill their lives, to come in and control their lives, possess them… is a very common notion… The idea that people can be influenced by evil, and that Satan is a personal being who can influence us, and that Satan can take control of our minds and influence our behavior, is a very common notion to Christians and non-Christian religious people.” Gardner reminded the court that a number of religions still engage in exorcisms, to remove evil spirits that have taken possession of individuals.

“Are people who practice exorcisms,” Horton asked, “are they mentally ill, necessarily, because they believe in evil spirits?”

“Certainly not,” Gardner answered.

Later, Gardner expounded further on the distinction between believing in preposterous religious tenets and clinical delusion. “A false belief,” he reiterated, “isn’t necessarily a basis of a mental illness.” He emphasized that most of mankind subscribes to “ideas that are not particularly rational… For example, many of us believe in something referred to as trans-substantiation. That is when the priest performs the Mass, that the bread and wine become the actual blood and body of Christ. From a scientific standpoint, that is a very strange, irrational, absurd idea. But we accept that on the basis of faith, those of us who believe that. And because it has become so familiar and common to us, that we don’t even notice, in a sense, it has an irrational quality to it. Or the idea of the virgin birth, which from a medical standpoint is highly irrational, but it is an article of faith from a religious standpoint.”

Gardner explained that what makes Ron Lafferty’s religious beliefs “so striking is not that they are somewhat strange or even irrational, because all religious people have… irrational ideas; what makes them different is that they are so uniquely his own.” And although Ron had constructed his own idiosyncratic theology, Gardner insisted that he did so “in a very non-psychotic way… He created it by whatever feels good to him. He says, ”It just gives me a sense of peace, and I know it’s true,“ and it becomes a part of his own unique article of faith. That is not a product of a schizophrenic, broken brain.”

When defense attorney Mike Esplin was given an opportunity to cross-examine Dr. Gardner, he attempted to make Gardner concede that because Ron’s theology was so outlandish, and “non—reality based,” it must be psychotic. But the psychiatrist stood his ground.

“There are many irrational ideas that are shared in the community that are non-psychotic,” Gardner replied. “We all hold to non—reality based ideas.” Then, in a fascinating digression, he used as an example his own upbringing in a conservative Protestant family that adhered to the teachings of Archbishop James Usher, the Irish theologian who came to prominence in the seventeenth century. His family’s beliefs, Gardner explained to the court, were “somewhat fundamentalist, not Mormon.” Although his father was an intelligent and very well-read physician, “a highly respected person and scientist in the community,” he raised his children to believe “the world was created in six literal days, 6,000 years ago.” Gardner recalled being taken, as a small child, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where his father scoffed at the exhibits, insisting that the world wasn’t nearly as old as the museum placards claimed—that the archaeological and geological evidence indicating the earth was many millions of years old was simply “a deception of Satan,” intended to fool the gullible.

His father’s stubborn belief that the world was created six thousand years ago, in just six days, was “a pretty irrational idea,” Gardner testified, “but he learned the idea just the way we do all other ideas”: from his family, and from the culture in which he was raised. And by these very means, Gardner said, his dad instilled that same irrational idea in him when he was a boy: “I learned the earth was 6,000 years old, just like two plus two is four.”

Ron Lafferty’s theology, Gardner argued, is definitely strange, but it is not an outgrowth of schizophrenia, or some other sickness of the brain. Ron’s beliefs are rooted in things he was taught at an early age from his family and his community, just as Gardner’s own beliefs are. And although Ron’s theology amounts to “an odd set of ideas,” as Gardner phrased it, those ideas nevertheless have “a kind of cohesive coherence that is not unlike the coherence of other non-verifiable belief systems, other sorts of religions.”