When Dustin Lance Black came face to face with a murderer, he knew he had to tell the truth about a crime that brought him closer to his Mormon roots
Under the Banner of Heaven
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SCREENWRITER DUSTIN LANCE BLACK is recalling the time he came face to face with a murderer. In a Utah maximum security prison, he felt the man’s bright eyes and charisma radiate through the Plexiglass and immediately thought of Silence of the Lambs.
“I understood what sociopathy looks like,” Black says. “As he edged closer, I could see how pleased he was with himself, how much he enjoyed that he was about to have the opportunity to tell his story again. I wasn’t having it.”
Discovering Dan Lafferty had nothing new to say about the murder he had committed – indeed, that he stood by the court’s verdict and media coverage – which Black retells in his truecrime drama series Under the Banner of Heaven, Black said, “Stop right there. I’m not here to help you get off on the torture and murder of women.”
In 1984, the Mormon community was rocked by the brutal murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old baby Erica in American Fork, Utah. Having married into a Mormon family and dared to question its more fundamental members’ subjugation of women, Brenda was killed by her brothers-in-law, Dan and Ron.
At the time, Black’s family lived in a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas. His father left to marry his first cousin – “his first step towards fundamentalism”, says Black; the pair remain estranged – and the community rallied to help his mother Roseanna, who had been paralysed from the chest down since contracting polio as a child, and her three children.
When the family moved to California three years later, 13-year-old Black began a journey of discovery. He read about San Francisco gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk, America’s first “out” politician, whose story he would later explore in his 2009 Oscar-winning script for the biopic Milk, starring Sean Penn.
Embracing his own sexuality – he now has two sons with his husband, British Olympic diver Tom Daley – Black began to unpick the emotional damage that fundamentalist beliefs can inflict on individuals’ identities. “Family comes first to Mormons, which is good,” he explains. “But only up to a point: for a long time, [that meant] as long as you’re heterosexual.”
Black has previously explored Mormonism as a screenwriter on Big Love, an HBO drama about polygamy, and narrated 8: the Mormon Proposition, a documentary about the church’s opposition to gay marriage. But the Lafferty case had stuck with him since reading journalist Jon Krakauer’s 2003 non-fiction book about the case, after which the series is named. Brenda’s outspokenness reminded him of his mother: “All my work addressing Mormon issues is in defence of
