The disturbing true crime behind FX's Under the Banner of Heaven
Under the Banner of Heaven stars Andrew Garfield as a Mormon detective tasked with solving the gruesome murder of 24-year-old Brenda Wright Lafferty (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her infant daughter.
While Garfield and Gil Birmingham's characters aren't necessarily based on real people, the rest of the characters are. The mini-series is based on author Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book of the same name that details the 1984 murder case that shook the state of Utah.
We put together a brief run-down of the real-life Lafferty case for the true-crime obsessed and generally curious. Potential spoilers for what's to come in Under the Banner of Heaven follow.
In 1982, 21-year-old Brenda Wright married Allen Lafferty (played by Billy Howle), the youngest of six Mormon brothers. The two met at an LDS group led by students of Brigham Young University, where Brenda was a broadcast journalism major. She had every intention of pursuing a career as an anchor, but was urged by Allen to become a stay-at-home mom.
A year later, Brenda gave birth to a baby girl named Erica, and the three lived in the quiet town of American Fork, Utah, just thirty-miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
Brenda wasn't the biggest fan of Allen's brother Ron (Sam Worthington), who had been excommunicated from the LDS Church after claiming that he was a prophet who received direct communication from God. Ron and his other brother Dan (Wyatt Russell), who believed in him wholeheartedly, had been part of a fundamentalist offshoot of the church called the School of Prophets – referred to by some as a 'polygamist cult.'
In 1983, Diana, Ron's wife of 20 years, filed for divorce. According to court documents (as reported on by Utah's Deseret News outlet), he blamed
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