Publishing house Doubleday has printed 350,000 copies of 'Under the Banner of Heaven' so far, though the LDS church-owned Deseret Book chain won't stock it. Still, zealots such as Lafferty and Mitchell tarnish the church's image, and polygamy remains inextricably linked to the church's early decades. It excommunicates those who advocate plural marriage. The Mormon church has nothing to do with fundamentalists, church officials say. 'He does a huge disservice to his readers by promulgating old stereotypes.' Krakauer's 'basic thesis appears to be that people who are religious are irrational, and that irrational people do strange things,' Otterson said. Alleged abductor Brian David Mitchell claims God told him to take Elizabeth as a 'sister wife.' Krakauer tries to add a larger context to the killings and their alleged connection to Mormon fundamentalism by examining the secretive communities of polygamists, those who have given up the practice and the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case. With Dan Lafferty as a main source, Krakauer writes that the brothers decided to practice polygamy and committed the killings because Brenda opposed them. Dan Lafferty is serving a life sentence and Ron Lafferty, who claimed to have the revelation to kill, is on death row. The slayings were committed by Dan and Ron Lafferty, who slit their victims' throats and later claimed God had ordered the slayings.

Krakauer brothers