by Jon Krakauer
After being raped by her father for the better part of a year, Evangeline became pregnant, but she miscarried the baby two months later. In April 1997, when she failed to conceive again, Kenyon cast Evangeline out and abandoned her in Guatemala; she was two months shy of her thirteenth birthday. “I lived by myself for about four months,” she recalls. “When I ran out of food I went to stay with some friends in Guatemala City.” After about six months, these Guatemalan acquaintances managed to contact her grandmother, Lavina, in Colonia LeBaron, and Lavina drove down to Guatemala and rescued her.
Evangeline currently lives in the American Midwest; she is married and has a baby son. She's doing well, all things considered, but she's extremely worried about her younger siblings, six of whom are girls, all of them still traveling with Kenyon Blackmore, presumably, somewhere in Central or South America. Her father, she reports, intends to “marry” each of his daughters when they turn twelve years old. “I'm concerned about my sisters,” Evangeline says. “I don't want them getting raped. I'm still not over it. It's something that . . . haunts you, something that's always there.”
The oldest of Evangeline's sisters had her twelfth birthday in May 2001, the next in February 2003; another will turn twelve in July 2004.
TWENTY-TWO
RENO
Joseph Smith bequeathed his followers a troublesome legacy, the conviction that it was “the Kingdom or nothing” and the belief that any act that promoted or protected God's work was justified. Some have tried to dismiss Mountain Meadows as an isolated event, an aberration in the otherwise inspiring history of Utah and Mormonism, but it was much more a fulfillment of Smith's radical doctrines. Brigham Young's relentless commitment to the Kingdom of God forged a culture of violence from Joseph Smith's theology that bequeathed a vexatious heritage to his successors. Early Mormonism's peculiar obsession with blood and vengeance created the society that made the massacre possible if not inevitable. These obsessions had devastating consequences for Young's own family. In New York in 1902, William Hooper Young, the prophet's grandson, slit the abdomen of an alleged prostitute and wrote the words “Blood Atonement” in his father's apartment.
WILL BAGLEY,
BLOOD OF THE PROPHETS
It was around two o'clock on the afternoon of July 24, 1984, when Dan Lafferty cut Brenda Lafferty's throat and let her life drain across the floor of her kitchen in a viscous crimson flood. Since he'd already killed Brenda's baby, the first half of the removal revelation had been completed. Ron Lafferty then drove Dan, Chip Carnes, and Ricky Knapp to the home of Chloe Low, which was located on an unpaved, out-of-the-way street in Highland, Utah. Their immediate plan was to “remove” Low, as God had commanded in the second part of Ron's revelation, then go to the nearby residence of Richard Stowe—president of the Highland LDS Stake—and slash his throat as well. Once they'd thus fulfilled the entire commandment, the path would be clear for work to commence on the City of Refuge, which was to be built next to the Dream Mine in preparation for the Last Days.
When they arrived at the Low home, Ron parked his Impala station wagon out of sight on a side street and he and Dan crept up to the house to determine who might be inside. As it happened, nobody was there: the Lows had gone to their summer home on Bear Lake, up near the Utah-Idaho border, for the Pioneer Day holiday. Ron returned to the car and told Carnes and Knapp, “Well, there ain't nobody here, so we're just going to rip it off and see if we can find any guns and some money or whatever we can get.” After backing the car into the Lows' carport, Ron grabbed his 20-gauge shotgun and told Carnes to act as a lookout while he and Knapp returned to the house, where Dan was waiting for them.
Ron, having been a guest in the Low home many, many times over the previous dozen years, knew it well. After removing a window, he, Dan, and Knapp disabled the burglar alarm, entered the house, and ransacked it. While they were inside, two boys from the neighborhood drove up on a noisy all-terrain vehicle. Carnes, who was conspicuously holding a .30–30 Winchester rifle and wearing a ski mask in the suffocating July heat, dove out of the station wagon and hid in some nearby brush as the neighborhood kids approached the front door and then knocked for a long time, over and over. Inside the house, Dan and Ron heard the boys knocking but simply ignored it, calmly continuing their search for valuables. After a few minutes the boys quit pounding on the door and roared away in a cloud of blue smoke.
Dan, Ron, and Knapp stole a hundred-dollar bill, a watch, car keys, and some jewelry, and then, in an act of spite, Ron destroyed Chloe Low's collection of porcelain figurines from Dresden, Germany, which he knew she treasured for sentimental reasons. The burglars exited the home via a back window, picked up Carnes, who was still hiding in the scrub, and drove off.
The next item of business on their agenda was the murder of Richard Stowe. Knapp was driving. Ron gave him directions to Stowe's home, but the route was complicated and Knapp missed one of the turns. According to Dan, “Ron yelled something to Ricky like, ‘Hey, that's where we were supposed to turn!' But by that point there wasn't much enthusiasm for continuing to fulfill the revelation right then.”
The four men briefly discussed whether to turn around and go back to the Stowe home. Carnes, who was growing increasingly anxious, begged Ron to forget about the remainder of the revelation. “If the Lord wanted you to kill someone else today,” Carnes pleaded, “you'd already be there.” To his surprise and immense relief, Ron concurred without argument and told Knapp to continue in the direction he was heading, which would take them to Interstate 15.
Had they turned around and driven to President Stowe's residence that afternoon, they would have found him, unlike Chloe Low, at home. He was taking advantage of the holiday to do some work on his house with his son, using a tractor to remove a set of concrete steps. It's impossible to know what would have occurred had the Lafferty brothers gone on to Stowe's property, but considering the number of guns in their possession, it's not difficult to imagine the bloodshed that might have ensued if Ricky Knapp hadn't missed the turn.
But he did miss the turn, so instead of going back to kill Stowe, the four men drove on to Salt Lake City, where Knapp exited Interstate 15 and steered the car west onto Interstate 80. As they drove, Dan held the sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun in his lap so it would be ready in case they were pulled over by the police. Their destination was Reno, Nevada.
As the Impala sailed down the freeway, Knapp finally mustered the courage to ask Ron and Dan what, exactly, had happened inside the apartment of Allen and Brenda Lafferty, back in American Fork. According to Dan, he described to Knapp in considerable detail how he had killed Brenda and her baby, recounting the murders exactly as he would later recount them in chapter 16 of this book—which also matches his sworn testimony during a 1996 trial in every important detail. Dan says he made it very clear to Knapp and Carnes that he, not Ron, actually wielded the knife that ended the lives of both Brenda and Erica.
But Chip Carnes remembers this episode differently. In his own sworn testimony during the same 1996 trial, Carnes insisted in an entirely believable manner that it was Ron, not Dan, who told Knapp and him about the murders during the long, sweltering drive from Salt Lake to Nevada. And Ron's story differed from Dan's in one crucial regard. According to Carnes, Ron said that
as soon as he went in the house, he punched [Brenda] as hard as he could, and she fell down again on the floor. And he said that he was calling her a bitch, and, you know, telling her what he thought about her.
And he said that she was begging him and pleading with him, you know, to stop. And he said he just kept beating her and beating her; said she wouldn't go down and stay down.
So while he got Dan to hold her on the floor, he said that he got up and cut a vacuum-cleaner cord off and proceeded to tie it around her neck, kept it there until Dan told him—to let him know that she had went limp.
And he said at that time he removed the cord, and him and Dan picked her up, took her into the kitchen, laid her on the floor
, and cut her throat. He said he cut her from ear to ear, and he demonstrated how. . . .
A little bit later on after that, Ron had pulled a knife out of his—removed the knife from his boot. And he started banging it on his knee, and said, “I killed her. I killed her. I killed the bitch. I can't believe I killed her.” He went on to brag about his knuckle being swelled up, you know, maybe broke, you know, from hitting her.
Carnes testified that when Ron boasted of cutting Brenda from ear to ear, he had also described, in repugnant detail, how after he drew the knife across her throat, he yanked her head back and
opened her neck so the blood would flow freely and everything. And he then said he handed the knife to Dan. He turned and he kind of glanced at me, and then he looked back at Dan and said, “Thank you, brother, for doing the baby, because I don't think I had it in me.” And Dan replied and said, “It was no problem.”
Dan doesn't dispute the essential facts in the last two sentences of Carnes's testimony, but he says the rest of it is fiction. Dan is adamant that he, not Ron, killed Brenda, pointing out that he has no reason to lie about this—unlike Carnes. After the police arrested Carnes, the state told him they would charge him with capital homicide and seek a death sentence unless he provided them with evidence that led to the conviction of both Ron and Dan on first-degree murder charges. If Carnes's testimony turned out to be sufficiently helpful to the prosecution, the state assured him, “we will make you one heck of a deal.”
Dan Lafferty says he was “a little surprised” that Chip Carnes misunderstood Ron's involvement in the murders, “unless he was encouraged in some way by the prosecution. Or maybe he was just confused. I don't blame Chip, either way. It was a pretty intense scenario, and when I explained it in the car to him and Ricky, probably a lot of it didn't make a lot of sense.”
Perhaps the question of who actually used the knife is a relatively unimportant distinction; when they forced their way into Brenda's apartment in American Fork, the hands of both brothers got bloody, literally and metaphorically. The murders were a team effort. Ron and Dan were equally culpable. A big-hearted young woman and her baby girl were dead, and nothing was going to change that fact as Ron, Dan, Carnes, and Knapp drove west into the blinding white glare of the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The fugitives reached the Nevada state line around six in the evening. As soon as they were out of Utah they pulled off the interstate and rented a bungalow at a cut-rate motel in the border town of Wendover. It had been a long day. Everybody was tired and frazzled. Dan rinsed out their bloody clothes in the bathtub, and then all four men walked to a cheesy little gambling parlor–cum–convenience store, where they bought beer and hot dogs to take back to the motel for dinner.
Around 11:00 they were sitting around the motel room drinking beer when “all of a sudden Ron decided it was time to go,” Carnes said. They hastily repacked everything into the Impala and took off, with Knapp at the wheel. Immediately he saw flashing lights in the rearview mirror. It was the Nevada Highway Patrol.
Knapp pulled over and got out of the car to talk to the officer while the others sat with their guns at the ready, prepared to open fire if it looked like the cop had figured out who they were and why they were wanted by the law. But the officer never realized they were fugitives. Instead of attempting to arrest the men, he simply told Knapp that the Impala's taillights were out and that the car was leaking gas. Knapp, betraying nothing, politely assured the officer that they'd get everything fixed right away. The cop told him just to drive the car back across the Utah line and out of his jurisdiction because he didn't want it blowing up in Nevada, and then drove off into the night.
The four fugitives let out a collective sigh of relief, then replaced the fuse for the taillights. The fuse blew again as soon as they switched the lights back on, however, so they returned to the motel to wait for daylight. Leaving all their belongings in the car, Ron and Dan lay down to get some rest. But Knapp and Carnes were still way too freaked by their encounter with the policeman to even think about sleeping, so they left the room to buy cigarettes.
“We went out walking around,” said Carnes. The twenty-three-year-old had a really bad feeling about what was going down. “I told Ricky how I felt about what, you know, I thought was happening. And he told me that he was pretty much feeling the same way.” Carnes then confessed to Knapp that he was about to make a run for it: “I'm out of here. As soon as they go to sleep, I'm gone.”
Carnes and Knapp went back inside the motel room, playing it cool, so that Ron and Dan wouldn't suspect that something was up. “As soon as I was sure they were asleep,” said Carnes, “I took the keys and told Ricky, ‘I'll see you later.' Ricky said, ‘Wait a minute. I'm coming with you.' ”
Carnes and Knapp pushed the Impala far enough down the road so that the brothers wouldn't hear them turning the engine over, then started it up and got the hell out of there. Knapp drove, keeping his foot lightly on the brake pedal so that the brake lights would stay on, thereby preventing them from being pulled over again.
They went west on Interstate 80, then turned north on U.S. 93 toward Twin Falls, Idaho, eventually deciding to take a roundabout route, mostly on back roads, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Carnes's brother Gary lived. As they drove, they kept finding evidence of the crime in the station wagon—the boning knife used to kill Brenda and Erica; a garbage bag holding the bloody clothes Dan had rinsed out in the motel bathtub; a green suitcase with two straight razors in it—and whenever they came across this stuff, they chucked it out the window.
Carnes and Knapp arrived at Gary Carnes's home in Cheyenne on Thursday morning. Four days later police spotted the Impala parked out front, raided the house, and arrested them. Because they had been drawn into the Laffertys' orbit and become entangled in the brothers' murderous crusade, the odds were good that both Carnes and Knapp would be convicted and sentenced to death. When the cops explained this to them, they quickly agreed to reveal everything they knew in return for a promise of leniency. Police officers were thereby able to recover the murder weapon, as well as most of the other evidence that had been dumped during the fugitives' panicked drive across Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming. Knapp and Carnes also provided detectives with an important lead about the whereabouts of the Lafferty brothers, revealing that they had talked about going to Reno.
Bernard Brady, the Dream Mine investor and business partner of Kenyon Blackmore who had introduced the Lafferty boys to the Prophet Onias, arrived home from work on Wednesday afternoon, July 25, he remembers, to find “all these cop cars in front of my house. Just up and down the street—cop cars everywhere. So I went inside to see what was going on, and my house was filled with cops. My family was seated on the couch, having been told if they moved they would be shot. They were terrorized.”
The horde of police officers was literally ripping apart the house, looking for evidence. As soon as Brady walked in the door, a grim-faced detective told him to “sit down and shut up.”
Annoyed at being treated as a suspect, Brady asked to see their search warrant. “When they showed it to me,” he says, “I noticed they had the address wrong. The warrant authorized them to search an address across the street and a couple of houses down, not my house. So I went over to one of the cops and pointed out that they were conducting an illegal search. He showed it to the sheriff, who came back and insisted it was a valid warrant anyway, and they kept on tearing the house apart.”
It proved to be a fruitful search. In a drawer the officers found the affidavit Brady had notarized back on April 9, stating that he had been shown the removal revelation but wanted to have nothing more to do with it. They also took into evidence some files about the School of the Prophets, as well as the computer on which Ron had typed out most of the revelations he had received—although it did not contain the removal revelation. Soon thereafter, however, the police obtained another search warrant, for an unoccupied house where Ron had been squatting before he and Dan embarked on their road t
rip. One of the closets inside this home yielded a flannel shirt, and in the breast pocket of the shirt was a note written on a sheet of yellow legal paper, in Ron's tidy hand. It turned out to be the original copy of the removal revelation.
When the Lafferty brothers went to bed in their Wendover motel room late on the night of July 24, they both fell into a deep sleep. They awoke the following morning to discover that Knapp and Carnes had vanished with the Impala and everything inside it, leaving them flat broke, with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Instead of being angry, Dan says, “I thought that maybe it was a good thing in some ways. I certainly didn't blame them, all considered, and I was inclined to think it was meant to be because Ron and I had slept so soundly.” After pondering their options, Ron suggested they split up, hitchhike across Nevada, and rendezvous in the Reno area at John Ascuaga's Nugget, a casino in Sparks they'd visited during their road trip earlier that summer.
Dan stuck out his thumb beside the westbound on-ramp to Interstate 80 and was immediately picked up by a trucker in an eighteen-wheeler, who gave him a ride all the way to Reno. He spent that night huddled in a historic steam locomotive on display in a city park, then passed the following day skulking around the Nugget until Ron showed up.
After they found each other, Ron and Dan were standing outside the entrance to the casino, Dan says, “when this big guy named Bud staggered out and kind of puked a little by the curb, and when he did his wallet fell to the ground. . . . It was about the fattest wallet I've ever seen.” Instead of keeping it, Dan handed the wallet back to Bud, who in gratitude let the brothers sleep on his floor that night, then invited them to go water-skiing with him the next morning. They spent the day relaxing above the crystalline depths of Lake Tahoe, drinking beer and eating Bud's sandwiches. He bought them a big dinner in Truckee that evening, then drove them back to downtown Reno.