If that's where her “flaws” ended, she'd make the perfect martyr.īut it's not. Instead Brenda is deemed insubordinate by his brothers for attending college, wishing for a career, and for meddling in Lafferty family affairs, despite her status as a woman and an outsider. It typically relates to husbands, but in this case Allen isn't much for authority. In this case, Brenda's “crime” is her willingness to question her priesthood holder, a term used by the LDS Church to describe male authority figures.

This bad thing is ultimately what leads to their death and shakes up the protagonist's worldview. The ones who are perfect and beautiful and hollow, and the ones who are perfect and beautiful and hollow until we learn they've done a Bad Thing. You see, there are two kinds of dead wives. This Brenda is not perfect, which does not exclude her from the dead-wife trope in and of itself. With that in mind, any further reference to Brenda in this piece is based on the fictional version of her that is depicted in this television show. We also know she was hated by certain Lafferty brothers for her perceived effect on their wives. Through Krakauer's investigative reporting we know that she was also from a Mormon family, won first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant in 1980, and anchored a local news show while attending Brigham Young University. It's here that I must remind readers that Brenda Lafferty was a real person and there are things we know about her. This leaves viewers to remember Brenda as she was when she was alive. We get flashes of a blood-covered body as Pyre explores the initial crime scene, but her death is more apparent through the detective's emotional response. Right at the top of the first episode, UBH resists the urge to shock viewers by depicting the violence done to Brenda and baby Erica.

Tv tropes pyre