Emerson Phillips
The 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter Erica by two of her husband’s brothers shook the Mormon fundamentalism community and put a spotlight on its dark side.
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FX on Hulu will air a limited series on the saga. Under the Banner of Heaven premieres April 28 and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Brenda and Andrew Garfield as the lead detective whose faith is shaken as he uncovers the truth.
The series is based on the 2003 book of the same title by Jon Krakauer, who details what Brenda struggled against – the killers she fought on the day she and her child died, and the destructive forces coming from within the Lafferty family.
Brenda and Erica were murdered in their home. Police in American Fork, Utah initially took Brenda’s huband Allen in for questioning and figured him to b the prime suspect. But Allen had been working all day on a construction site 80 miles away, and he told the police in very certain terms who they should be looking for.
With that, the manhunt for then 42-year-old Ronald Lafferty, Allen’s eldest brother, began – and the investigation took the first of a series of disturbing turns.
With the Under the Banner of Heaven series injecting more of a true-crime-style investigation into the series than is featured in the book, Garfield’s Detective Jeb Pyre is inspired by the real-life authorities who worked the haunting case. The character incorporates a bit of Krakauer too, the writer having uncovered a seriously disturbing story beyond the crime itself.
“I’ve seen a lot of death in my career,” former American Fork Police Department Chief Terry Fox, who in 1984 was a detective on his city’s then-10-man force, reflected to Salt Lake City’s KSLTV in 2019. “This one was different in the case, that it was religiously motivated. You can use the word brutal, horrific. And I just don’t throw those out lightly because this was a really, really brutal murder. It was different from a lot of crime scenes in a lot of ways.”
The day after the killings, before police had even found him, Ron—a onetime city councilman who’d grown increasingly extreme in his beliefs and was ex-communicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—was charged with first-degree murder, as was his brother Dan Lafferty on July 27.
Investigators said that, from what they’d gathered so far from interviews with friends and family, Ron claimed to have received word from God that he needed to kill the enemies responsible for his ex-communication, and the list of names he dutifully wrote down included Brenda and Erica.
Under the Banner of Heaven delves all the way back into the founding of Mormonism by Joseph Smith in 1830, the schism between his widow Emma Smith and Brigham Young, Smith’s successor as head of the LDS Church, and more of the very real intrigue that shaped the belief system that was at the center of the Lafferty family’s world.
