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by
Jon Krakauer
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March 10 - March 18, 2025
They sentenced him to die, either by lethal injection or four bullets through the heart at close range.
You really need four?
There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout—there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist
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Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it will be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara,* 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 will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For
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Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God—as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.
And it shall come to pass that I, the Lord God, will send one mighty and strong, holding the scepter of power in his hand, clothed with light for a covering, whose mouth shall utter words, eternal words; while his bowels shall be a fountain of truth, to set in order the house of God. THE DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS, SECTION 85 REVEALED TO JOSEPH SMITH ON NOVEMBER 27, 1832
His bowels shall be a fountain of truth…?!
Polygamy is illegal in both Utah and Arizona. To avoid prosecution, typically men in Colorado City will legally marry only the first of their wives; subsequent wives, although “spiritually married” to their husband by Uncle Rulon, thus remain single mothers in the eyes of the state. This has the added benefit of allowing the enormous families in town to qualify for welfare and other forms of public assistance. Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community
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Colorado City has received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave its streets, improve the fire department, and upgrade the water system. Immediately south of the city limits, the federal government built a $2.8 million airport that serves almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. Thirty-three percent of the town’s residents receive food stamps—compared to the state average of 4.7 percent. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest
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At the time Linda Kunz married Green, her mother, Beth Cooke, was also married to Green, although Cooke has since left him. (Seven of the ten women Green has married, and all of his current wives, were the children of his other wives when he married them; he has made a habit of marrying his stepdaughters, all of whom were sixteen or younger when he brought them into his matrimonial bed.)
Ever since the conviction of the Kingstons—even before Tom Green was first charged with bigamy—Mormon Fundamentalists have received support from the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights activists in advancing their claims of religious persecution. It has been an especially curious, and uncomfortable, coalition: FLDS doctrine proclaims that sodomy and homosexuality are egregious crimes against God and nature, punishable by death—yet gays and polygamists have joined forces to keep the government out of the bedroom. This partnership is made even more incongruous by the fact that on the
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“Polygamists say they are being attacked because of their religion,” she told the Salt Lake Tribune, “but where in the Constitution does it say that it’s OK to molest and impregnate young girls?”
As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie’s own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.
According to the Law of Chastity, sexual intercourse is officially forbidden even between husband and wife unless the woman is ovulating.
Debbie remembers older boys taking girls as young as four into a big white barn behind the school to play “cows and bulls” among the hay bales. A boy who would grow up to become a prominent member of the church leadership raped one of Debbie’s friends when he was twelve and the girl was seven.
As for Brian David Mitchell, in the days following his arrest he steadfastly insisted that he had done nothing wrong, arguing that forcing a fourteen-year-old girl into polygamous bondage was not a criminal act because it was a “call from God.” Speaking through an attorney, he explained that Elizabeth was “still his wife, and he still loves her and knows that she still loves him.”
The elaborate stage, the lights, and the Mormon throngs all materialize here every summer for “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: America’s Witness for Christ,” which is due to begin at sunset. According to promotional materials published by the LDS Church, the pageant is “America’s largest and most spectacular outdoor theatrical event . . . , a magnificent, family-oriented production,” replete with arresting special effects straight out of Hollywood: “volcanoes, fireballs, and explosions with sound effects from the movie ‘Earthquake.’ A prophet is burned at the stake. Lightning strikes the mast of a
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I’d watch
As history, moreover, The Book of Mormon is riddled with egregious anachronisms and irreconcilable inconsistencies. For instance, it makes many references to horses and wheeled carts, neither of which existed in the Western Hemisphere during the pre-Columbian era. It inserts such inventions as steel and the seven-day week into ancient history long before such things were in fact invented. Modern DNA analysis has conclusively demonstrated that American Indians are not descendants of any Hebraic race, as the Lamanites were purported to be. Mark Twain famously ridiculed The Book of Mormon’s
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All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.
Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another.
This stat really dates this book
Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.
If one person may speak for God, why may not another? By claiming an ongoing dialogue with divinity, Joseph Smith opened the door to a social force he could barely control. RICHARD L. SAUNDERS, “THE FRUIT OF THE BRANCH,” DIFFERING VISIONS: DISSENTERS IN MORMON HISTORY
In the beginning, Joseph Smith had emphasized the importance of personal revelation for everyone. Denigrating the established churches of the day, which were more inclined to filter the word of God through institutional hierarchies, he instructed Mormons to seek direct “impressions from the Lord,” which should guide them in every aspect of their lives. Quickly, however, Joseph saw a major drawback to such a policy: if God spoke directly to all Mormons, who was to say that the truths He revealed to Joseph had greater validity than contradictory truths He might reveal to somebody else? With
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lol
The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support—which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation.
Commonly, the children were present to witness the punishment when Watson hit Claudine—a reserved, submissive wife whom Dan describes as “a good woman and an excellent mother.” The children were also present when Watson clubbed the family dog to death with a baseball bat.
Fucking monster
God explained that northwestern Missouri was among the earth’s holiest places: the Garden of Eden had not been located in the Middle East, as many believed, but rather in Jackson County, Missouri, near what, by the nineteenth century, had become the city of Independence.
I can’t read Jackson County, Missouri without hearing it sung in my head
Laid out across a limestone flat beside the mud-brown flow of the Mississippi River, Nauvoo is a small, tidy town with little on its surface to distinguish it from hundreds of other small, tidy towns that freckle the American heartland.
Neither Emma’s tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.
Outspoken by nature, Emma despised polygamy and did not hesitate to make her views known to the prophet. At one point she even threatened to take a plural husband if he didn’t give up his plural wives, prompting Joseph, on June 23, 1843, to complain to his secretary that Emma was “disposed to be revenged on him for some things. She thought that if he would indulge himself she would too.”
Seems fair
Thus persuaded, Joseph agreed to commit to paper the revelation that became Section 132. Not coincidentally, it repeatedly mentions Emma by name. For example, in the revelation’s fifty-fourth verse God warns, And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.
Lmfao
If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another . . . , then he is justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him. . . . And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given unto him; therefore he is justified. . . . But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed; for they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment.
Hahahaha fuck off
On February 24, Ron became the first of Onias’s students to take delivery of a commandment from the Almighty. Sitting at a computer he’d borrowed from Bernard Brady, Ron closed his eyes and waited until he felt the spirit of the Lord cause a finger to depress a key, and then another, and another. By and by, a message from God inched across the screen: Ron’s inaugural revelation. He received a second revelation on February 25, and a third on the 27th.
Come on
“Ron was a little bit frightened by the things he was receiving,” says Dan. “I told him, ‘Well, I can see why you’re concerned, as well you should be. . . . All I can say is make sure it’s from God. You don’t want to act on commandments that are not from God, but at the same time you don’t want to offend God by refusing to do his work.”
Brady’s concern was genuine and acute, but he didn’t alert the police; nor did any other members of the School of the Prophets. Brady merely filed the affidavit in a desk drawer in his home, so that if Ron did kill anyone, Brady could prove that he was blameless. Neither did any of the school members—despite their alarm upon learning of the removal revelation—see fit to alert any of the people designated for removal. Later that month, however, Dan took it upon himself to inform his youngest brother, Allen, with whom he had always been especially close, that God had commanded the ritual murder
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Baffling
Dan earnestly asked Allen what he thought of Ron’s revelation. Allen replied that because he, personally, hadn’t received any such revelation from God, he couldn’t accept it; he said he would defend his wife and child with his life. But Allen never bothered to tell Brenda of his brothers’ declared intent to murder her and their baby.
How do you not tell your wife that she’s in danger?!
Betty Wright McEntire heard all of this for the first time when, twelve years later, she listened to Carnes testify from the witness stand of the Fourth District Court in Provo. And when she learned that Claudine Lafferty had been sitting right there, quietly listening as her two oldest sons discussed the imminent murder of her daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter, Betty was stunned. “How could someone hear what they were planning and not do anything to warn Brenda?” she asks. “I just can’t understand it.”
On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother’s house.
This is an insane sentence
“I spoke to her for a minute. 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 I set my hand on her head, put the knife under her chin like this, and I just . . .” Pausing in his monologue, Lafferty uses his manacled hands to matter-of-factly demonstrate how he pulled the razor-sharp butcher’s knife so forcefully across Erica’s neck that he very nearly decapitated her; afterward, all that held the baby’s head to her tiny body were a few thin shreds of skin and tendon.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. . . . You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as
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To the world beyond the confines of their tribe, however, Brigham Young and his counselors vigorously denied that Mormons engaged in polygamy. And they would continue to deny it for years to come, even after the Mormons were established in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Historian D. Michael Quinn refers to the Saints’ bald-faced dissembling as “theocratic ethics.” The Mormons called it “Lying for the Lord.”*
A rising chorus of non-Mormon voices declared Brigham to be a dangerous tyrant who wielded absolute power over his followers. One Gentile visitor warned that “on the face of the whole earth there is not another people to be found, so completely under the control of one man.”
Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.* ANTHONY STORR, FEET OF CLAY
The oldest of the brothers, Benjamin, was fond of roaring at the top of his lungs in public to prove that he was “the Lion of Israel.” In one legendary incident that occurred in the early 1950s, he lay facedown in the middle of a busy Salt Lake City intersection, bringing traffic to a halt, and did two hundred push-ups. When the police finally persuaded him to get up off the pavement he proudly insisted, “Nobody else can do that many. That proves I’m the One Mighty and Strong.” Not long thereafter, Ben was committed to the Utah State Mental Hospital.
As he dragged his young wives and their pack of semiferal children back and forth across Central America, Kenyon received a series of revelations in which God told him that he was “the last prophet before the return of Jesus Christ.” God told him, in fact, that Jesus would come back to earth in the form of a child born of Kenyon’s pure seed and his daughter’s virgin womb. Heeding the Lord’s commandment, in June 1996, on Evangeline’s twelfth birthday, he took her as his wife—that is to say, he began raping her on a regular basis.
The Lafferty brothers visited Circus Circus early on the afternoon of August 7, but they didn’t see Debbie dealing cards at any of the blackjack tables. According to Dan, he inquired of Ron, “‘Should I go and ask for her?’ which I knew would spring the trap.” Ron told him to go ahead and do it. When Dan approached a pit boss and asked to speak with Debbie, Dan says, “his eyes got big and he quickly disappeared.” At that point Ron and Dan strolled over to one of the casino’s eateries and got in line for the lunch buffet. As they stood in the queue, Dan says, he could see men who appeared to be
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Baffling
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 epistemological 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
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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
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After the beating, their jailers separated the brothers, placing them in adjoining cells. Not long thereafter, Ron handed Dan a piece of paper through the bars. Written on it was a revelation Ron said he’d just received, in which God commanded Dan to let Ron kill him. After praying for guidance, Dan says, “I felt that I should submit to what it said, and we discussed how it might be done. We thought the best way might be for me to back up to the bars and let him put a towel around my neck and choke me out.”
“Mom says you have to let me hit you”
As soon as Dan agreed to let Ron kill him, he remembers, “I felt the urge to vacate my bowels,” which he interpreted as a further sign that the revelation was valid and should be followed. He understood that going to the commode was part of God’s meticulous plan, Dan says, so that “I wouldn’t make a mess when I died and my muscles relaxed—actually the bowel goes into spasm but the bladder muscles relax when you are throttled.”
What if killing Brenda and Erica Lafferty wasn’t actually part of God’s plan but was merely a crime of such staggering cruelty that it is beyond forgiveness? What if, in short, Dan got it all wrong? Has it occurred to him that he may in fact have a great deal in common with another fundamentalist of fanatical conviction, Osama bin Laden?
What about Osama’s underlings, the holy warriors who sacrificed their lives for Allah by flying jumbo jets into the World Trade Center? Surely their faith and conviction were every bit as powerful as Dan’s. Does he think the sincerity of their belief justified the act? And if not, how can Dan know that what he did isn’t every bit as misguided as what bin Laden’s followers did on September 11, despite the obvious sincerity of his own faith? As he pauses to consider this possibility, there comes a moment when a shadow of doubt seems to flicker across his mien. But only for an instant, and then
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Although the prophecy of his father, Uncle Rulon, that the world would be swept clean in a hurricane of fire by the year 2000 did not come to pass, the events of September 11, 2001, have renewed Warren’s optimism.
That’s quite a sentence
