Under the Banner of Heaven (13 page)

Brady, energized by Onias’s ideas, set out to recruit worthy candidates for the school. One of them turned out to be a fellow named Watson Lafferty Jr. “He was a real quality individual,” Brady asserts. “And Watson said he had five brothers who were just like him. So I met them, and the whole Lafferty family was outstanding. They all had real strong convictions, but especially Watson’s older brother Dan. He would go out of his way to help others much more than most people would. And Dan was unique in the strength of his desire to do what was meaningful, to do what was right. A white lie here and there—to most people that wouldn’t be a big thing. But to Dan it would be unthinkable.”

Brady pauses, and a look of overwhelming regret darkens his face. For a moment he looks like he’s going to burst into tears. He recovers his composure, with visible effort, then, in a faltering voice, continues: “So I introduced Dan Lafferty to Bob Crossfield. Looking back on it now, it’s unfortunate that I was the catalyst who brought Bob and the Laffertys together. But it happened.”

EIGHT

THE PEACE MAKER

In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.

Eugene Linden, The Future in Plain Sight

Dan Lafferty grew up with his five brothers and two sisters on a four-acre farm just west of Salem, Utah. Their father, Watson Lafferty Sr., had served as a barber on an aircraft carrier in World War II; following the war he enrolled in chiropractic college on the G.I. Bill. Upon completion of his training, he opened a combination chiropractic practice-barbershop—beauty salon in a spare room in his home, and settled down to raise his family to be exemplary Latter-day Saints.

Watson Lafferty spent a lot of time thinking about God. He also spent a lot of time thinking about the government, and the relationship the former should properly have with the latter. He was highly impressed with the ideas of Ezra Taft Benson—the prominent Mormon apostle, Red-baiter, and John Birch Society supporter who in 1961 announced that there was an “insidious infiltration of communist agents and sympathizers into almost every segment of American Life.”* Even in archconservative, ultra-Mormon Utah County, the hard rightward lean of Watson’s political views, as well as his extreme piety, caused the Lafferty patriarch to stand out.

*Benson, who served as secretary of agriculture under President Eisenhower, eventually became president and prophet of the entire LDS Church, holding that position from 1985 until his death in 1994.

Dan characterizes his dad as “strong-willed,” a “very individual individual,” and “strict about a lot of things.” In fact, Watson Lafferty was a formidable disciplinarian who did not hesitate to beat the living tar out of his children or his wife, Claudine, to enforce his rules. 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.

Among Watson Lafferty’s more strongly held beliefs was a deep distrust of conventional medicine. When Dan’s oldest sister, Colleen, came down with acute appendicitis as a young girl, their father was adamant that she be treated at home with prayer and homeopathic remedies. Only after her appendix burst and death was imminent did he grudgingly take Colleen to the hospital. Watson ultimately died himself in 1983 after refusing medical treatment for advanced diabetes.

Despite the fact that Watson was a violent bully, Dan loved his father intensely and admired him. To this day Dan considers him a superb role model. “I was blessed to be raised in a very special and happy family,” Dan insists. “We never wanted for anything. My parents truly loved and cared for each other.” Dan recalls that his dad often took his mom out dancing, and “it wasn’t unusual to hear my father ask my mother if he had told her lately that he loved her.” Once when Dan was attending the Provo temple with his family—with everyone dressed in white temple garments, and the women and men sitting on opposite sides of the hall—he remembers his father leaning over to ask him, sotto voce, “if I had ever seen anyone as beautiful as my mother” as she sat with the other women across the room. In the celestial glow of the temple’s sacred chambers, Dan remembers vividly, his mother looked “angelic and radiant.”

According to Dan, his parents placed “their family at the very center of their life, along with the LDS Church.” The Laffertys belonged to a congregation in the nearby community of Spring Lake, says Dan, and worshiped at “the perfect picture-postcard church, by a lake, with just a few houses around. It was in that lake where I learned to swim and fish, and in the winter we had ice-skating parties with family and friends.” Young Dan was a model Latter-day Saint, virtuous and compliant, “zooming down the highway to heaven,” as he puts it. “I was a hundred-and-ten-percenter. I sang in the choir. I always paid my tithing; in fact, I always paid a little extra, just to make sure I made it into the highest kingdom of glory.”

Although Dan’s father adhered rigidly to Mormon doctrine, he could not be called a fundamentalist. “I don’t think the word
polygamy
was ever mentioned while I was growing up,” says Dan. “It never even crossed my mind. The first time I ever had a conversation with anyone about polygamy, it was about a group of missionaries in France who were excommunicated after they studied Section 132 together and decided polygamy was a principle that should be practiced. I can still remember thinking to myself, ”How could anyone sacrifice their membership in the church over that old, discontinued principle?“ ”

After high school Dan went on a two-year mission to Scotland, where he met Matilda Loomis, a divorced mother of two young girls, who made a powerful impression on him. Six years after returning from his mission, Dan bumped into Matilda by chance at a missionary reunion. “I was getting kind of old by then,” Dan says, “and my father and older brother, Ron, had been getting on me to get married. I had met a lot of lovely girls previously, but whenever I prayed about whether I should marry them, I realized none of them was the right one. So then I ran into Matilda at this reunion, and I thought, Well, I should probably pray about marrying her, too, before she goes back to Scotland, just in case that’s what God has in mind for me. And this time I was quite surprised to get a positive answer to my prayers. So I told Matilda that we should get married.

“I thought it was going to be really awkward trying to explain that God intended her to be my wife, and I was worried how she would react.

So I was kind of thrown off when she answered, “Yeah, I know.” I said, What do you mean, “I know? She explained that God had told her to come to America just for that reason, to get married. She said that she was expecting me to ask her.” Within three months Dan and Matilda were sealed as husband and wife in the Provo temple and moved to California, with Matilda’s kids in tow, so that Dan could enroll in the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic.

One Sunday near the end of their five years in California, Dan and Matilda happened to hear a member of their local LDS ward give a talk about plural marriage. “During the talk this guy said, ”Okay, let’s see a show of hands from everybody who comes from a polygamous background,“ ” Dan recalls. “And there were only like four people who didn’t raise their hands in the whole congregation. That really got my attention. I decided to learn everything I could about polygamy.”

When Dan completed his chiropractic training he moved his family back to Utah County, and there he embarked on an energetic investigation of the polygamous history of the Latter-day Saints. Nosing around in the special collections of the Brigham Young University library one afternoon, he came across a fifty-one-page typescript of a nineteenth-century tract in praise of plural marriage:
An Extract, From a Manuscript Entitled “The Peace Maker,” or the Doctrines of the Millennium: Being a Treatise on Religion and Jurisprudence. Or a New System of Religion and Politicks.
It had been written by a mysterious figure named Udney Hay Jacob. The booklet’s title page indicated that it had been published in 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois, and that the printer was none other than Joseph Smith himself.

The Peace Maker
offered an elaborate biblical rationale for polygamy, which it proposed as a cure for the myriad ills that plagued monogamous relationships and, by extension, all of humankind. Part of that cure was making sure that women remained properly subservient, as God intended. According to the tract,

The government of the wife is therefore placed in the husband by the law of God; for he is the head. I suffer not a woman saith the Lord to teach, or to usurp authority over a man, but to be in subjection…

A right understanding of this matter and a correct law properly executed would restore this nation to peace and order; and man to his true dignity, authority and government of the earthly creation. It would soon rectify the domestic circle and establish a proper head over the families of the earth, together with the knowledge and restitution of the whole penal law of God, and be the means of driving Satan, yea of driving Satan from the human mind…

Gentlemen, the ladies laugh at your pretended authority. They, many of them, hiss at the idea of your being the lords of the creation… Nothing is further from the minds of our wives in general, than the idea of submitting to their husbands in all things, and of reverencing their husbands. They will boldly ridicule the idea of calling them sincerely in their hearts lords and masters. But God has positively required this of them…

Here, the wife is pronounced the husband’s property, as much so as his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, or his horse…

It is evident that by [abandoning the sacred principle of plural marriage], an endless catalogue of crime has been created that otherwise could never have existed; and that does exist at this moment in these States. Husbands forsake their wives, and often brutally abuse them. Fathers forsake their children; young maidens are seduced and abandoned by the deceiver; wives are poisoned and put to death by their husbands; husbands are murdered by their wives; new born babes are cruelly murdered to hide the false shame created by the false, and wicked, and tyrannical law against polygamy…

While on the other hand polygamy regulated by the law of God as illustrated in this book could not possibly produce one crime; neither could it injure any human being. The stupidity of modern Christian nations upon this subject is horribly astonishing…

The question is not now to be debated whether these things are so: neither is it a question of much importance who wrote this book! But the question, the momentous question is: will you now restore the law of God on this important subject, and keep it? Remember that the law of God is given by inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Speak not a word against it at your peril.

Because Joseph Smith was listed on the title page as the printer of
The Peace Maker,
because the treatise precisely reflected many of his teachings—and because it concluded with the cryptic declaration that it was not “a question of much importance who wrote this book!”—scholars and others have long speculated that Joseph was the author. Determining who wrote
The Peace Maker
was important to Dan Lafferty. “I really wanted to know if this was Joseph Smith’s writing,” he says. “So I studied, and prayed, and after a period of time the Lord gave me enough knowledge to become quite satisfied that Joseph Smith wrote it… I don’t know for sure that it’s Joseph Smith, but I’ll be surprised if it wasn’t.”

The fact that
The Peace Maker
was apparently the work of the prophet made Dan especially receptive to the ideas expounded in its pages. With all the zeal one would expect from a “hundred-and-ten-percenter,” he wasted no time in applying the book’s fundamentalist strictures to his household, which had by then grown to include Matilda, her two daughters from a previous marriage, and four children she and Dan had conceived together.

Under the new rules, Matilda was no longer allowed to drive, handle money, or talk to anyone outside the family when Dan wasn’t present, and she had to wear a dress at all times. The children were pulled out of school and forbidden to play with their friends. Dan decreed that the family was to receive no outside medical care; he began treating them himself by means of prayer, fasting, and herbal remedies. In July 1983, when their fifth child was born, a son, Dan delivered the baby at home and circumcised the boy himself.

They began raising much of their own food, scavenging the rest from Dumpsters behind grocery stores, where stale, unsold bread and overripe produce were regularly discarded. Dan turned off the gas and electricity. No publications of any kind were allowed in the home, except LDS books and magazines. Dan even got rid of all their watches and clocks, believing they should “keep time by the spirit.” When Matilda disobeyed Dan, he spanked her.

Spank
was the verb Dan used. According to Matilda, the blows he delivered felt more like “thumps.” And when he thumped her, he often did it in front of Dan’s mother, his brothers, and all their children. Afterward, he warned Matilda that if she continued to disobey, she would be forced out of the marriage without her children—who, according to the principles elucidated in
The Peace Maker,
were the father’s property.

Dan also announced that he intended to engage in spiritual wifery at the earliest opportunity. And the first woman he proposed taking as a plural wife was Matilda’s oldest daughter—his own stepdaughter.

“I had come to a place there was no choices,” Matilda later testified in court. “I could either go and leave my kids, or stay and accept it.” She elected to stay.

Matilda said that the first years of their marriage had been “extremely happy and hopeful… And then it just disintegrated… I would dream of him dying so I could get out.” By then, she said, her life had become “a hellish situation.”