On July 24, 1984, fundamentalist Mormons Ron and Dan Lafferty broke into the home of their brother Allen and murdered Allen's wife Brenda and their 15-month-old daughter Erica. The brutal crime shocked Utah's large, scandal-averse Mormon community and was the subject of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book , Under the Banner of Heaven: Violence, first published in 2003. The theme of "The Story of Faith" . Adapted into a Hulu miniseries of the same name, starring Sam Worthington and Wyatt Russell as Ron and Dan Rafferty, and Andrew Garfield as Jeb Peel, a fictional Mormon Teach detectives to question their own beliefs while investigating a murder.
As Krakauer brilliantly describes in his book "Under the Flag of Heaven," and as other reporters have investigated over the years, Ron and Dan Rafferty did not appear out of thin air. They are the product of a large, complex, and deeply dysfunctional family, led by the overbearing patriarch Watson Lafferty Sr. Dan, not the eldest sibling, but a brother nonetheless The sisters' intellectual and spiritual leader, he convinced the siblings to embrace liberal and fundamentalist Mormon principles such as polygamy. Ron is the emotional heart of the group, and after the breakdown of his marriage, he falls into fundamentalism. The youngest, Ellen, is torn between loyalty to her brother and his wife.
Below, learn more about each member of the Rafferty family.
Watson Rafferty Sr.
Lafferty family patriarch Watson Lafferty Sr. grew up without his mother: She died during the 1918 influenza pandemic when he was just 5 years old. “I don’t think he had a lot of upbringing,” his son Watson Jr. told The Salt Lake City Weekly in 2014. Krakauer said he later served in the Army in World War II, but Not on the front lines. , but as a barber. After the war, the GI Bill allowed him to train as a chiropractor, and he opened his own practice, which also offered barbering and salon services. But Watson Sr.'s true passion was living a godly life. His interpretation of Mormon theology is traditional and influenced by his far-right political views. He doesn't believe in traditional medicine, and he expects his wife, Claudine, and children to obey his orders. If they don't, he beats them.
Watson Sr.'s abuse of his wife had a different impact on his sons. Decades later, Ron Rafferty angrily recalled these episodes in The Weekly : "I saw him get angry and make her face and nose bleed. I used to go into my room and curse God gave me such a terrible father. I shake my fist at God, but I'm so small." Instead, Dan insisted to Krakauer that he was "blessed to grow up in a very special and happy family. …..My parents truly loved and cared about each other.” Another brother, Watson Jr., provided the Weekly with a more thoughtful perspective on Watson Sr.’s violent behavior and how it shaped Rafferty’s sons: "When you grow up in a family where your father licks you, the other siblings comfort you who's being licked, and then you compare bruises and take care of each other that way."
Watson Rafferty Sr. wasn't just angry with his immediate family. The children once witnessed him brutally beating their dog with a baseball bat until the dog died. Dan's daughter Rebecca told The Weekly that she remembers Watson Sr. throwing a toy at her head when she was a child and telling lies when the toy made her cry. "I knew as a kid to stay away from him," she said.
In the end, Watson Sr. was destroyed by his rigid beliefs. He was so distrustful of modern medicine that at one point he tried homeopathic remedies to treat his daughter Colleen's appendicitis (she was eventually taken to hospital). He himself was diabetic but refused to take insulin. In 1983, his health deteriorated, but his sons refused to treat him. As expected, their home treatments did not cure him and he died.
Claudine Rafferty
The Rafferty brothers' mother Claudine was not that dominant during their childhood: after all, according to Watson Sr.'s theology, her primary role was to obey his every command. Dan described her to Krakauer as "a good woman and a wonderful mother" and remembered her looking "angelic and radiant" at the church ceremony.
After Watson Sr.'s death, Claudine aids her sons in their increasingly disturbing pursuits. Following in Dan's footsteps, several of the Rafferty children joined an extremist Mormon group called the School of the Prophets. Sessions were sometimes held at Claudine's home, just above the chiropractic clinic where Dan and Rafferty's other brother, Mark, worked. Later, Ron, Dan, and their colleagues Ricky Knapp and Chip Kearns met there to discuss Ron's "revelation" that would lead to the murders of Brenda and Erica. Kearns said in court testimony that Ron "claimed he was told he had to eliminate some people. I had heard the name Brenda and I had heard something about the baby." At the time, Claudine Rafferty ( Claudine Lafferty sat in her room, knitting silently.
"How could anyone hear about their plans and not do anything to warn Brenda?" Brenda's sister Betty Wright McEntire asked Krakauer. "I just can't understand it."
As of 2004, Claudine reportedly worked at the Provo Mormon Temple. She died in 2016 at the age of 96.
Dan Rafferty
Ron may have been the eldest of the Rafferty brothers, but it was Dan Rafferty who had the greatest influence on the family after his father's death. He described his childhood to Krakauer in optimistic terms. He painted his parents as an ideal couple - despite his father's tendencies for domestic violence - and said the family also attended "a picture-postcard church." He noted that he was a particularly enthusiastic young Mormon: "I was one hundred and ten percent centrist [ sic ]. I sang in the choir. I always paid my tithing; in fact, I always pay a little more just to make sure I get into the realm of the highest glory.”
Dan went on a mission trip to Scotland, where he met a young divorced woman with two daughters named Matilda. Six years later, he met her at a missionary gathering in the United States, and they were soon married. After their marriage, they moved to Los Angeles so that he could follow in his father's footsteps and attend chiropractic school. After he completed his training, the family moved back to Utah and he began working in the family business. During this time he and Matilda had four children.
After returning to Utah, Dan began researching Mormon history, which led him to discover The Peacemaker , an obscure historical Mormon text printed in 1842 by Mormon founder Joseph Smith. The pamphlet defended polygamy and outlined a vision of patriarchal marriage and child-rearing that was more unbalanced than the already conservative version pursued by the Rafferty family. Krakauer said, "Under the new rules, Matilda was no longer allowed to drive, handle money, or talk to anyone outside the family when Dan wasn't around, and she had to wear a skirt at all times." Soon, Dan was completely Rejection of medicine and public school education. He threw away all the non-Mormon texts in the house, broke all their clocks, and would "span" Matilda if she didn't listen to him.
But Matilda's daughter Rebecca remembers her mother struggling with Dan's increasingly extreme beliefs. "She would let the chickens run around the house and say, 'Okay, let's live free!' and then she would let the chickens poop everywhere," Rebecca told The Weekly . Matilda also "publicly encouraged" her husband to find a second wife so she could leave the marriage. Although Matilda tried to stand up to her domineering husband, Dan began beating her - and insisted that his ideal candidate for a second marriage was his 14-year-old stepdaughter. Although he eventually gave up on the idea and married another woman, Rebecca remembers seeing him caressing her sister's exposed breasts. Eventually, Matilda gave in to his demands: "I came to a place where I had no choice," she testified in Dan's court case. "Either I leave my kids or I stay and take it."
As Dan delved deeper into Mormon fundamentalist beliefs, he also became obsessed with liberal ideas. In 1981, Watson Sr. and Claudine traveled abroad on business, leaving him and Mark in charge of the family and the family business, an almost disastrous decision. Dan refused to pay property taxes on his father's property because, he later explained to Krakauer, the property was "freely and clearly owned." By paying property taxes, you are basically telling the government that they are the ones who actually own the property, because you are giving them the right to take the property from you if you don't pay the taxes. I'm willing to go through a confrontation to determine who actually owns the property. The state was not interested in Dan's idea and began the process of repossession of the property. When Watson Sr. found out what had happened at the home, he was furious and had to step in at the last minute to save his business.
Eventually, most of the Rafferty brothers followed Dan's lead and embraced Mormon fundamentalism and liberalism, first away from mainstream Mormonism and then away from rational thought altogether. The evangelist of their fundamentalism was a man named Bob Crossfield (aka Prophet Onias), founder of the School of the Prophets, a polygamist sect that believed in divine revelation. (In addition to his other objectionable beliefs, Onias also vehemently opposed black people becoming Mormon priests, calling them the spawn of Satan in a racist slur referenced in "Under the Banner of Heaven .") Encountering Onias After Yas, Dan, Ron, and most of their other brothers soon became obsessed with Onias and his ideology - an ideology that directly led to the murders of Brenda and Erica.
Dan later explained his involvement in the murders of Brenda and Erica Rafferty as part of a divine plan, but expressed no remorse. In a defense that lasted only 13 minutes as his own lawyer at the first trial, he said: "I don't know why these names [Brenda, Erica and others] are on the list... God has a weird job to do. I just know, if you ask me, it's weird." At his second trial in 1996, he testified, "I'm not ashamed of what happened. … It’s just a business matter.”
Dan Lafferty remains incarcerated in the maximum security wing of the Utah State Penitentiary, serving a life sentence.
Ron Rafferty
As mentioned above, Ron Rafferty spent much of his childhood under the control of his overbearing, abusive father. "I wanted to kill my father," he told the Weekly. "Every time I saw him hit my mom," Ron said, the conflict was resolved when he finally struck back at his father at age 17. He recalled that his father "ran away like a little bitch, crying 'Mom, mom!'"
After high school, Ron went on a successful mission trip to Florida and then returned to Utah, where he found a good job in construction and became a respected church member, a city councilman, and a Devoted husband and father. He and his wife, Diana, whom he met on a mission trip, have six children. According to Diana's friend Penelope Weiss, they were extremely happy together. "I remember a happy marriage that lasted sixteen and a half years," she told Krakauer. Ron was not only a good husband, but a good brother and, as the other Raffertys called Krakauer, a "hen type." He provides advice and emotional support to his younger siblings and serves as a voice of reason when disagreements erupt. He may also be fiercely protective of his family: Dan recalls Ron beating up a kid who bullied him at school.
Diana suggested that Ron offer some of his idiosyncratic advice to his brothers in 1982, when nearly all of them were drawn into Dan's extremist movement and tormented their wives as a result. Ron attended a meeting at his brother's home and asked some skeptical questions about Dan's extremism. "Ron was embarrassed by me," Dan told Krakauer. "He was a devout saint, and he said I was a disgrace to Mormonism. He told me, 'There's no place for extremes in this church!'" But Ron quickly became a convert to Dan's cause. In the blink of an eye, he went from being the sanest and most emotionally stable member of the family to one of its most passionate fundamentalists. As a result, he soon lost his job, and a year later he also lost his family: his wife filed for divorce and fled to Florida with their children.
After being converted by Dan, Ron soon joined the School of the Prophets. Onias received a revelation that led him to appoint Ron as bishop of the local chapter. With no job or family to distract him, Ron became obsessed with the School of the Prophets and focused on Onias's teachings on divine revelation. In February 1984, he began to uncover the truth, culminating in his "revelation" calling for the murder of Brenda and Erica. Ron's revelations also called for the murder of Ron's family friend Chloe Low, the wife of the local parish bishop, and Richard Stowe, a prominent Mormon official in the community. "My desire is to remove them in quick succession and to follow their example so that others may see the fate of those who struggle with God's true saints," Ron wrote, purportedly speaking in the voice of God. However, at trial, Watson Rafferty Jr. testified that Ron disliked Brenda and called her a "jerk."
On July 24, 1984, Dan and Ron murdered Brenda and Erica. They broke into Chloe Low's home but found no one and were unable to reach Richard Stowe's home. Instead, they traveled first to Salt Lake City and then to Reno, Nevada, where they were discovered and arrested by police along with associates Ricky Knapp and Chip Kearns.
After the murder, Ron attempted to hang himself in prison, an act that caused brain damage, his lawyer Therese Michelle Day said in 2019. He was tried three times. At his first trial, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. His lawyers appealed and he was found incompetent to stand trial and underwent psychiatric treatment. Three years later he was tried again, found guilty and sentenced to death after being declared competent again. But he was not executed: Instead, the case dragged on in Utah courts for decades until he finally died of natural causes in 2019. In fact, the appeals process lasted so long that Brenda's sister, Sharon Wright Weeks, has become an advocate against the death penalty. "I don't want another person to suffer the pain that I know," she told U.S. News & World Report last year. "If sentenced to death, their personal hell will begin."
Alan Rafferty
Alan is the youngest member of the Rafferty family. After a mission trip after high school, he began attending Latter-day Saint (LDS) student gatherings in Provo, Utah, even though he was not a student himself. He met his future wife Brenda Wright in the hospital room. Brenda is a student at Brigham Young University who aspires to be a newscaster. "She dated a lot of boys before, but she never had a crush on any of them. Ellen was different," her sister Betty told Krakauer. "He was a returned missionary, and the Raffertys were the perfect Mormon family. Everyone in Provo seemed to know them. Plus, Allen was a charming guy—all the Rafferty boys They all have this ability to fascinate you, and Brenda fell in love with it.”
Ellen and Brenda were married on April 22, 1982. The couple settled in American Fork, a suburban town in Utah, where Allen ran a tile business. However, after getting married, their relationship became strained. Ellen pressured Brenda to quit her job at the local news station, get a job at a nearby mall, and quit that job too so she could stay home and start a family. About two months after the wedding, she became pregnant and subsequently gave birth to daughter Erica.
Meanwhile, Allen began to follow in his brother's footsteps, embracing their liberal beliefs about taxes. According to Beatty, he didn't even want to register his car out of fear of government surveillance. He also became increasingly strict about his religious beliefs - for example, he refused to eat anywhere that served food on Sundays. As the older Raffertys drifted further down the path of religious fundamentalism, Brenda worked hard to prevent Ellen from making the same mistakes. She asked her sisters, Betty and Sharon, to keep an eye on Alan when he visited so they could keep track of the time he spent with his brothers. She also advised him not to formally join the Academy of the Prophets. "Brenda stood up to those Rafferty boys," her mother, LaRae Wright, told Krakauer. "She told [Allan] in no uncertain terms that she didn't want him to do things with his brothers. The brothers blamed her for it and separated their family. The Rafferty brothers didn't like Brenda because she was in the way "
But Brenda was unable to convince her husband to leave the family completely, and Alan continued to stay with his increasingly unstable and extremist brothers. In testimony during one of Ron Lafferty's murder trials, he testified that Ron resented Brenda for "meddling in [brother's] affairs," adding that Ron often called her a "jerk ". He also testified that he was aware of Ron's revelations about killing Brenda and Erica. He told the court that when he asked why Erica needed to be "removed," "Ron blurted out that she was going to grow up to be a jerk like her mother."
Allen also testified, "I told [Ron] that God had not revealed such a revelation to me and that I would protect [Brenda and Erica] with my life." But he did not do enough to To do this, on July 24, 1984, he found his wife and daughter dead in their home. He knelt beside Brenda and prayed. He was detained as the prime suspect - after all, he was the deceased's husband and father, and he was covered in blood - but he managed to explain the story to investigating detectives, who then began searching for Ron.
As of 2004, Allen was reportedly living in Southern California.
Mark Rafferty
In many ways, Mark Rafferty was his brother Dan's partner in crime: "As kids," Dan told Krakauer, "we were inseparable." They milked the family cows together, played together during the summer, and later Working together at what was once their father's chiropractic clinic. While working together as adults, they bonded through long discussions about politics and religion. According to Dan, his brothers would "show up quite mysteriously... unannounced. We would have some very, very precious time talking things over." At first, everyone except Ron participated.
Later, as the brothers became more committed to Mormon fundamentalism and the School of the Prophets, Mark fully believed Ron's "revelations": He even drove to Nevada to bet on what Ron claimed he saw in a vision. (The bet didn't work out.) According to Krakauer, Ron and Dan took weapons from Mark's house before murdering Brenda and Erica, with Ron announcing to Mark that he planned to hunt down "any fucking thing "It's getting in my way. "Despite clear and worrying signs of potential violence, Mark did nothing to stop his brother.
Watson Rafferty Jr. and Tim Rafferty
Watson Jr. and Tim Rafferty, the two youngest brothers in the family, were the least involved in crime, although they also embraced Dan and Ron's fundamentalism and attended the School of the Prophets. As mentioned above, Watson Jr. actually introduced Dan to Onias and expressed his passion for "destroying evil" through the straight razor he brought to the team. Recently, though, he reflected to The Weekly on the impact of growing up in an abusive home (see above, on Watson Sr.), and expressed concern that he might develop violent impulses like Ron and Dan. He left Utah and the Mormon Church for more than 25 years while pondering this question. In 2014, he told The Weekly that he had made peace with his faith, "I knew in my heart that those were two good people who had been caught by the devil. But the devil didn't care about them now; he hung them up to dry." "
Even less is known about Tim Rafferty other than that he attended the School of the Prophets.
