I knew Bennett was the man we love to hate, but I had never fully realized how much of the burden the Saints bore (and still bear) was directly caused by Bennett, much less how many broken hearts and deaths and general hardship in past history can be traced to Bennett. During the house concert the lyrics to one of the songs went something like “I wasn’t me that killed him. I just aimed and pulled the trigger. It was the bullet that did the killing.” That’s the way I feel about so much of what happened after May 1842 (actually, after May 1841 when the affair with Sarah Pratt started). Bennett took aim and did everything in his power to destroy Joseph and everything Joseph was trying to do.

I’m writing a chapter in my book where my main character is going to learn her sister died, that the editor of a major paper is suspicious of the concentration of powers in Nauvoo, that a respected friend is having an affair and has apparently induced an abortion, and that Bennett, the man who proposed to her, is not only the father of the aborted child but the one who prepared the abortifacent.