Under the Banner of Heaven (38 page)

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 trip. 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.

For the next two weeks Ron and Dan hung around Sparks and Reno, riding back and forth on the free double-decker shuttle bus, subsisting on the promotional largesse of the gambling industry. They became acquainted with the driver of the shuttle, and he allowed the brothers to sleep in his bus each night, “which was a real blessing,” Dan says. After his final run in the evening, the driver would have Dan and Ron hide under the seats while he drove into a secure, fenced-in lot in downtown Reno, where he parked the bus overnight. According to Dan, “The long padded seats in the back of the bus were real nice for sleeping, considering the alternative.”

Most days, Dan and Ron bided their time in the cavernous, air-conditioned chambers of the Peppermill Casino. Dan recalls that “the Peppermill had a big screen on which they showed the [Los Angeles] Olympics while we were there, and they also had coupons you could get each day if you had an I.D., which gave you a few chips to gamble with and a coupon for a plate of free nachos. I didn’t have an I.D., but Ron did, and it was our plan to gamble with the free chips to make enough to buy food, which sometimes happened but usually didn’t.”

After they’d been in Reno a couple of days, the Laffertys were approached by “a strange man,” according to Dan, who “had a beard and rose-colored glasses so you couldn’t see his eyes.” The fellow gave the brothers a reefer rolled from “some excellent weed,” asked them “a few strange questions,” then loaned Dan his I.D. card, enabling Dan to obtain free gambling chips and nachos. From that point on, Dan says, “we had at least two plates of nacho chips each day,” although that was often all they ate.

“We were pretty hungry most of the time,” Dan concedes, “but just when we needed food, someone would offer us something to eat. One couple invited us to their place for a Saturday barbecue, and this kid who was fishing in the little creek that ran through Reno took us for soup and salad at one of the casino specials when we really needed it.” And every few days, the strange man in the psychedelic glasses “came by to see us and get us high and ask how we were doing.” Dan believes, even now, that this person was an angel sent by God to look after them.