Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  “Unlike my older brother,” Dan says, “I didn't really have bad feelings toward Brenda or Erica. I was just doing God's will. Seeing Brenda lying there in the middle of the kitchen floor, I prayed about what to do next. I told Ron, ‘Get me something to tie around her neck so she won't regain consciousness.' Because I was feeling now like I was supposed to take the child's life first. Ron went and cut the cord off the vacuum cleaner and brought it to me. And then another fascinating thing took place: as he attempted to put the cord around her neck, some unseen force pushed him away from her. He turned and looked at me and says, ‘Did you see that?!'

  “I said, ‘Yes, I did. Apparently this is not for you to do. Give me the cord.' I wrapped it around her neck twice and tied it very tightly in a double overhand knot.”

  After Brenda had made her final desperate attempt to flee and then passed out on the kitchen floor, Ricky Knapp and Chip Carnes, still outside in the car, heard nothing more from inside the duplex. The silence scared Carnes, who told Knapp to get in the driver's seat and then commanded, “Let's get out of here.”

  Knapp started the car and backed out of the driveway, but then lost his nerve. “I can't leave them,” he told Carnes. He parked the Impala on the street in front of the apartment and waited, while Carnes slouched out of sight in the backseat.

  After tying the vacuum cord around Brenda's neck, Dan says, “I went into the front room and picked up the knife, then I walked down the hall, being led by the spirit, because I didn't know the layout of the house, or which room was the baby's. The first door I opened was where the baby was. She was standing there in the corner of her crib. I walked in. I closed the door behind me for privacy. I think the baby thought I was her father, because I had a beard, and Allen had a beard at that time. And we have identical voices.

  “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.

  “I closed my eyes,” he continues, “so I didn't see what I was doing. I didn't hear anything.” Lafferty shares the details of Erica's murder in a preternaturally serene voice, as if he were recounting a trip to a hardware store. “Then I walked down the hall into the bathroom and washed the blood off the knife. I didn't feel anything. At the time, I didn't even know if I had really killed Erica. Not until later, when they showed me the pictures of the crime scene. . . . I'm pretty sure she didn't suffer. Maybe I believe that just to make myself feel better—I don't know. But hopefully the knife was so sharp she didn't feel any pain.

  “Anyway, I washed the knife off. And when the knife was clean I walked into the kitchen and stood over Brenda. Straddling her, I untied the cord and took it off her neck. I grabbed her by the hair, placed the knife against the side of her neck, and drew it across her throat. Again I closed my eyes, so I didn't actually see anything. But this time I could hear the blade cut through the trachea, and feel it hit the bone of her spinal column. Then I walked back into the bathroom and washed off the knife a second time, turned to Ron, and said, ‘Okay, we can leave now.' ”

  Ron and Dan walked out the back door and returned to the car. When Knapp and Carnes saw the brothers' blood-soaked clothing, Dan says, “they kind of freaked out.” Carnes, especially, started to come apart.

  Frightened by the overpowering smell of blood in the car, Carnes grabbed Dan's shirt and demanded, hysterically, “You need to get rid of that smelly thing!”

  “When he said that,” Dan remembers, “I thought to myself, Hey, it's not even over yet. Why should I change my clothes now? We still have two other residences to visit.” But Dan obliged Carnes, all the same. As the Impala pulled away from the apartment, Dan removed his bloody shirt, borrowed a clean shirt from Carnes, and put it on.

  Ron, too, was extremely agitated, but Dan remained calm and unruffled: “I was completely comfortable that things had happened the way God intended them to happen. Ron was very shaken and very weak. He kept talking about the smell of blood on his hands. I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to comfort him.”

  As they drove, Ron seemed to regain some of his composure. Guiding the Impala through the thick July heat, taking care not to exceed the speed limit, he knew exactly where he was going: Highland, the next town to the north, where he and Dianna and their children used to live—and where Chloe Low still lived.

  Four months earlier God had instructed Ron,

  It is My will and commandment that ye remove the following individuals in order that My work might go forward. . . . First thy brother's wife Brenda and her baby, then Chloe Low, then Richard Stowe. And it is My will that they be removed in rapid succession.

  With the murders of Brenda and Erica, the first half of the revelation had been fulfilled. As they drove the short distance to Low's home, Ron and Dan talked about how they would carry out the rest of it. Following the commandment as closely as possible, they intended to first remove Low, then Stowe, executing them “in rapid succession” before the day was out. Although the brothers agreed that killing Low should “be easy, because she was a small woman,” Ron confessed to Dan, “I'm afraid I don't have the energy if we have to take the life of Chloe Low.”

  “You're worrying about things you shouldn't worry about,” Dan assured him. “I'll take care of that, just like I've taken care of this. Because it's the Lord's business.”

  PART III

  The best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show. . . . The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.

  WILLIAM JAMES, THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

  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 a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, AND

  OTHER ESSAYS ON RELIGION AND RELATED SUBJECTS

  SEVENTEEN

  EXODUS

  They went in bitterness and in hope. The persecutions, the massacres, the martyrdom of the prophet, the bloody flux and the black canker and desolate graves, had cemented them into a unit, and every successive wagon train for many years was like new flight out of Egypt. The Old Testament parallel was like a bugle in the brain; some of them probably even hoped for a pursuing Pharaoh and a dividing of waters. They had found their strength: Mormonism in exodus was a herd, like a herd of buffalo, and its strength was the herd strength and the cunning of the tough old bulls who ran the show. Brigham Young was no seer and revelator, but a practical leader, an organizer and colonizer of very great stature.

  WALLACE STEGNER,

  MORMON COUNTRY

  As dawn began to brighten the eastern sky, Porter Rockwell—the Destroying Angel, Joseph Smith's staunch body
guard and enforcer—hurtled toward Nauvoo at full gallop, seething with rage. It was June 28, 1844. Twelve hours earlier the Mormon prophet had been shot dead in the Carthage jail by a band of Illinois militiamen, despite Governor Thomas Ford's personal promise that Joseph would be protected from harm. When Rockwell reached Nauvoo, he shouted the grim news as he rode through the streets of the waking city: “Joseph is killed—they have killed him! Goddamn them! They have killed him!”

  The Saints reacted to Joseph's death with woe and staggering grief, vowing through their tears to exact revenge. First, however, they had to address a more pressing concern: the survival of Mormonism. The ten thousand mourners filing through Joseph's mansion to pay their respects and view his corpse despaired over who among the living would be able to lead the church through the months of critical peril that loomed. As distinguished historian D. Michael Quinn noted in his book The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, “Institutionally, Mormonism faced a dilemma of paramount consequence at Smith's death in June 1844: Can the church survive without the founding prophet? Like the removal of a keystone from an arch, would the entire structure collapse?”

  Joseph had neglected to provide his followers with a clear mechanism for determining his successor. Indeed, over the years he had hinted at various conflicting criteria for the transfer of power. The result, owing to his untimely demise, was a leadership vacuum that several would-be prophets scrambled to fill. Among the leading claimants were:

  • Joseph's eldest son, Joseph Smith III, who was only eleven years old when his father was killed and whom the prophet probably intended to be his successor when the boy became an adult.

  • Joseph's younger brother Samuel H. Smith.

  • Sidney Rigdon, the influential theologian whom Joseph had picked as his vice-presidential running mate in his 1844 campaign for the United States presidency—despite the fact that Rigdon, who suffered from “nervous spasms and swoonings,” was emotionally erratic and unreliable.

  • Brigham Young, the stalwart, ambitious president of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

  The contenders fell into two camps: those bitterly opposed to polygamy, who saw Joseph's death as an opportunity to eradicate the practice before it gained traction, and those who had already taken plural wives and regarded polygamy as a divinely ordained principle that must be sustained. Joseph had first come forward with his covert revelation sanctioning celestial marriage scarcely a year before his martyrdom—and even after he'd documented the revelation in writing, only a select group of his most trusted cronies had been let in on the secret. During the bleak, chaotic days that followed Joseph's murder, 95 percent of Mormons still had no clue that their prophet had married more than one wife and had declared plural marriage to be one of the most crucial keys to gaining entry to the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Emma Smith, Samuel Smith, Sidney Rigdon, William Law, and others who despised polygamy—committed Mormons who were convinced that it would be the ruin of their church—desperately wanted to install a successor to Joseph who would revoke the doctrine before it took hold. On July 13 Emma warned that if the next leader of the Mormons “is not a man she approves of she will do the church all the injury she can.”

  Apostles John Taylor, Willard Richards, Brigham Young, and their brethren in the pro-polygamy camp wanted just as desperately to install a prophet who would uphold the doctrine, lest the plural wives these men had covertly married be branded as whores.

  The succession crisis was further complicated by the fact that ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, including Brigham Young, were roaming far afield during the spring of 1844, having been dispatched across the nation by Joseph to drum up support for his bid to become president of the United States. Young, who was in Massachusetts when Joseph was shot, didn't learn about the prophet's death until nineteen days after the fact. Crushed by the news, Brigham initially despaired that without Joseph, the Mormon Church would surely disintegrate. “My head felt so distressed,” he lamented, “[I] thought it would crack.” As soon as they heard of the assassination, Brigham and the rest of the apostles rushed back to Nauvoo with the utmost haste.

  The anti-polygamy camp maneuvered furiously to have one of their own confirmed as prophet before the full Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had a chance to return to Nauvoo from various distant corners of the republic. Young Joseph Smith III had the most legitimate claim to the throne, but because he had not yet even reached puberty, the anti-polygamists focused their energies on giving the job to the departed prophet's younger brother, Samuel H. Smith, instead. On July 30, however, just as it was looking as if he had the job locked up, Samuel abruptly died. Compelling circumstantial evidence suggests that he succumbed from poison administered by Hosea Stout, the chief of the Nauvoo police, who was loyal to Brigham Young and the other polygamists.

  Following Samuel Smith's suspect death, Sidney Rigdon—another anti-polygamist—launched a frantic last-ditch effort to grab Joseph's mantle before Brigham and the other apostles arrived back in Nauvoo. Hurriedly securing the support of others in the anti-polygamy faction, he successfully maneuvered to have himself appointed “guardian” of the church, although the appointment wouldn't be official until it could be confirmed by a vote at a special churchwide gathering scheduled for August 8. It appeared to be a fait accompli—until Brigham Young and the rest of the apostles suddenly showed up on the night of August 6, just in time to put the brakes on the anti-polygamists' scheme to install Rigdon as Joseph's replacement.

  On the morning of August 8, 1844, the faithful of Nauvoo assembled to hear Rigdon and Young each explain why he should be the new Mormon leader. Rigdon argued his case for ninety minutes, with passion, but failed to persuade his fellow Saints that he was God's clear choice for the job. Then it was Brigham's turn to address the crowd, and an astonishing thing was said to have occurred, leaving no doubt about who would be the next prophet.

  “Brigham Young arose and roared like a young lion,” recalled John D. Lee, “imitating the style and voice of Joseph, the Prophet. Many of the brethren declared that they saw the mantle of Joseph fall upon him. I myself, at the time, imagined that I saw and heard a strong resemblance to the Prophet in him, and felt that he was the man to lead us.” Numerous Saints who witnessed Brigham's address (and even greater numbers who didn't) swore that he underwent an incredible transfiguration as he spoke, temporarily assuming the voice, the appearance, and even the physical stature of Joseph, who was a considerably taller man. After such a performance, Brigham had no trouble convincing most of those present that he should be their next leader, and thus did he become the Mormons' second president, prophet, seer, and revelator.

  It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened had Brigham's return to Nauvoo been delayed thirty-six hours, which might have allowed Rigdon to commandeer the helm of the church. One can safely assume that Mormon culture (to say nothing of the culture of the American West) would be vastly different today. In all likelihood the Mormons would never have settled the Great Basin, and LDS polygamy would have died in the cradle. As Rigdon's own son John observed, the Latter-day Saints “made no mistake in placing Brigham Young at the head of the church. . . . If Sidney Rigdon had been chosen to take that position the church would have tottered and fallen.”

  Like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young had been born poor in rural New England, where the brouhaha of the Second Great Awakening made a lasting imprint on his consciousness. He was baptized into the Mormon Church in 1832, at the age of thirty-one, and quickly became one of Joseph's most loyal lieutenants.

  Brigham's devotion to the founding prophet was deep and unswerving. He believed wholeheartedly in even Joseph's most extreme theological tenets—he may well have believed in them with greater conviction than Joseph himself did. Brigham was, however, Joseph's opposite in almost every imaginable way.

  Joseph was tall, athletic, and handsome; Brigham was short and thick (at his heaviest, he weighed more than 250 pounds), with small, po
rcine eyes. Joseph was emotional, charismatic, an impulsive dreamer and incorrigible charmer; Brigham was steady, dependable, and pragmatic to a fault, a brilliant organizer who thought things through and paid attention to the details. Joseph craved the adoration of his followers; Brigham didn't ask the Saints to love him—he demanded only their respect and unconditional obedience. Joseph conversed constantly with God, and in his lifetime received 135 revelations that were canonized in The Doctrine and Covenants, as well as many dozens more that were never published; Brigham had only a single canonized revelation, D&C 136, which, characteristically, had nothing to do with sacred mysteries: it simply specified how the Mormons should organize their wagon trains for their migration to Utah.

  To be sure, nobody ever called Brigham a religious genius, but when the Mormons faced imminent extermination in the wake of Joseph's martyrdom, religious genius wasn't what they needed. Instead, they required discipline and firm, decisive leadership, which is what Brigham ably provided. George Bernard Shaw praised him as “the American Moses.” He was the right man at the right time.

  In May 1845, nine men were indicted for the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, seven of whom were brought to trial in Carthage. Among the defendants in People v. Levi Williams, as the case was designated, were some of western Illinois's leading personages, including a colonel, a major, and two captains in the Carthage Greys; an Illinois state senator; and the editor of the Warsaw newspaper. Given the virulent anti-Mormon feelings throughout Hancock County, bringing the guilty to justice wasn't going to be easy. Adding to the likelihood that no convictions would be forthcoming, both John Taylor and Willard Richards—the Mormon apostles who'd witnessed the murders—announced that they refused to appear in court, fearing (with good reason) that if they came anywhere near Carthage, they would immediately be killed.