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e stubborn and determined and, above all, lucky.
Are you always so determined and stubborn?
No. One story I abandoned—after a lot of reporting and research— was about three
antigovernment renegades in the Four Corners region who gunned down a cop with automatic
weapons, in broad daylight on a busy street, in Cortez, Colorado, a few years back. The police
chased the bad guys into the desert, where two of them eventually turned up dead. The third fugitive
was never caught and might still be out there. I love spending time in the desert, and I had a wonderful
time researching the story. I got to explore some beautiful slot canyons in remote parts of the
Colorado Plateau, but the main subject of the story—the fugitive who may still be alive—wasn’t
someone I found sympathetic. He was a creep. The guy wasn’t likeable enough for me to invest years
of my life writing about him.
Is likeability a criterion in deciding whether to write about someone?
Not likeability exactly. Dan Lafferty certainly isn’t very likeable and he’s the central figure in
Under the Banner of Heaven. But I found him complicated and intriguing. The main character in the
fugitive story I abandoned lacked sufficient moral complexity and depth to sustain my interest. He
was merely a pathetic, hate-filled young man. Although Lafferty is abhorrent in all kinds of ways,
there are sides to him that I find fascinating, even sympathetic. He tells us some very disturbing things
about ourselves.
What kind of research do you do?
Essentially, I grab a shovel and start digging hard, for a long time—in the case of Under the
Banner of Heaven, I spent more than three years doing the research before I began to write. On a
couple of occasions in the past I’ve hired private investigators to help me find elusive fugitives (in
each case they failed), but I’ve never hired a researcher to help me with background for a book or
magazine project. I enjoy doing the research—I enjoy it a hell of a lot more than writing. I always
begin by combing library card catalogues, bookstores, rare-book dealers, the Internet, and newspaper
archives. A sense of place—a familiarity with the particulars of the landscape in question— is
always important to me, so I buy lots of maps.
For Under the Banner of Heaven, I spent a lot of time at Brigham Young University, the Salt Lake
City Public Library, and the Utah State Historical Society combing through card files. The Mormons
are such compulsive chroniclers of their past that any archive associated with Mormon history is
crammed with a staggering amount of material.
I pay special attention to names or events that may help me connect disparate narrative threads. For
instance, early in my research for Under the Banner, I learned that Dan Lafferty and his brother Ron
had joined a group called the School of the Prophets, where they learned how to receive revelations
from God—including the revelation in which God commanded them to slash the throats of their sisterin-law
and her baby girl. So I read the school’s sacred texts, unearthed the names of all of its