I had this interview with Dan Lafferty and it was maybe the creepiest experience of my life. I’m the most devout person you’ll ever meet.” He’ll never talk to you, he doesn’t talk to any press, but you should talk to me. Then I got a letter back from the prison but on the return, it wasn’t from Mark Hoffman. I thought he’d be good to interview, so I wrote him in prison. He pretended to be a devout Mormon, when really he was an apostate and an atheist and he committed these murders to cover up his forgeries. You know the story of Mark Hoffman, the guy who forged all these documents? There was a pretty good Netflix thing about him. The evidence seen is a vacuum cord that was tied around Brenda Lafferty’s neck. While the Lafferty murder has been public record for nearly 40 years, this oral history contains spoilers for the ending of the “Under the Banner of Heaven” series.ĭan Lafferty looks at evidence Tuesday, April 2, 1996, during testimony in the retrial for the 1984 murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty in Provo, Utah. Quotes may have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, and sometimes reordered to create a cohesive narrative.
(Representatives for The Church of Latter-Day Saints didn’t respond to multiple requests for this story.) What follows is a brief oral history with the principals - showrunner Black, Krakauer, executive producers Howard and Grazer, and its star, Andrew Garfield - in which they examine their own motivations in creating this dramatization of a tragedy that the Mormon Church would very much like to forget. That changed when FX picked up the option to adapt the book as a seven-episode limited series, with chairman John Landgraf championing the project and all its complexities. However, repeated attempts to adapt “Under the Banner of Heaven” into a feature screenplay revealed that the complex story was not designed to make a good movie. Black’s perspective of the faith won over Krakauer, as did the support of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer at Imagine. In 1984, Brenda Lafferty and her toddler daughter Erica were brutally murdered by members of the Lafferty family who believed their actions were cosigned by a direct revelation from God.įor Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning writer of “Milk” and a lapsed Mormon, bringing this story to the screen required more than a decade of work and a lot of false starts. The book also unpacks the tragedy of the Lafferty family, who were known in Provo, Utah as upstanding members of the Mormon faith. 'Bridgerton' Season 2: Everything You Need to Know About the Netflix HitĤ1 Great Films That Failed at the Box Office
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How 'Desus & Mero' Got Denzel Washington and More to Open Up Like They Never Have BeforeĮmmy Predictions: Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie No members of the Church today can enter into polygamy without being excommunicated.”) ( According to the church, which is now headquartered in Salt Lake City and has nearly 17 million members, “There is no such thing as a ‘fundamentalist’ Mormon… The Church discontinued polygamy more than a century ago. Even as the church officially abandoned polygamy, disenchanted Mormons created a modern-day Fundamentalist movement with multiple breakaway factions that hew to their (often conflicting) interpretations of Smith’s original teachings. The nonfiction book explores Joseph Smith founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with its revelations of polygamy, justifications of violence, and capacity to foster would-be prophets. That discomfort will become more acute with the April 28 premiere of FX limited series on Hulu, “Under the Banner of Heaven.” It also became a thorn in the side of the Mormon Church, where it has festered ever since: The book remains the top seller in Sociology and Religion on Amazon. With its exploration of how the principles of an American religion founded in 1830 informed a gruesome double murder 154 years later, Jon Krakauer’s “ Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith” became a New York Times bestseller in 2003.