Richard E. Turley Jr. is the author or editor of five books on the Mountain Meadows Massacre: Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2008), with Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard; Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Andrew Jenson and David H. Morris Collections (Brigham Young University Press and University of Utah Press, 2009), with Ronald W. Walker; Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers, Selected Trial Records and Aftermath and Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers, Initial Investigations and Indictments (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), with Janiece Johnson and LaJean Purcell Carruth; and Vengeance Is Mine: The Massacre at Mountain Meadows and Its Aftermath (Oxford University Press, 2023), with Barbara Jones Brown.

He has received numerous honors for his work, including from the American Historical Association, the American Library Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Mormon History Association, the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists, the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation, the Utah State Historical Society, Utah Humanities, the John Whitmer Historical Association, Latter-day Saints in Publishing, Media & the Arts, the Association for Mormon Letters, and Westerners International.