Lafferty family: ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ gets Brenda’s story wrong

Sharon Weeks pauses while speaking about the killing of her sister and niece to journalists at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Sept. 15, 2021. Weeks’ sister, Brenda Lafferty, and Brenda’s 15-month-old daughter, Erica, were killed by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, Brenda’s brothers-in-law, in 1984.

Spenser Heaps, Deseret News

When Sharon Wright Weeks, the sister and aunt of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, found out last year along with everyone else that the limited TV series adapted from Jon Krakauer’s book “Under the Banner of Heaven” would be airing, she braced herself.

She knows the vicious cycle all too well. She and her family have lived it for decades. The morbid fascination with the “infamous” Lafferty murders lives on, overshadowing 24-year-old Brenda and 15-month-old Erica’s memories with blood and gore.

Weeks — now a vocal advocate against the death penalty in Utah — blames that obsession in large part on the heightened media attention that locks on capital punishment cases. Today, almost 40 years after Brenda’s and Erica’s lives were stolen, their family is yet again submerged in a media frenzy as each new episode of “Under the Banner of Heaven” airs.

“I knew it was coming. I felt a heavy feeling that my sister was going to be murdered all over again on Tuesday, April 28, at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time,” Weeks told the Deseret News in an exclusive interview this week. “That’s what it felt like.”

Weeks understood the dramatized “Under the Banner of Heaven” series would ignite more curiosity and flood her with questions. She expected that. But what she didn’t expect was just how far the show would stray from reality. And how frustrated she’d be with the damage done to Brenda’s memory.

“This series, it’s absolute fiction,” Weeks said.

So Weeks wants to set the record straight. She wants the show’s viewers to differentiate fact from fiction. She wants them to know who Brenda truly was — and what the show gets wrong about her sister’s memory, her personality, and even her relationship with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“I’m frustrated,” Weeks said. “I’m frustrated with how it leads people. It doesn’t lead people to the truth or the reality of what happened.”

Source:: Deseret News – Utah News

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