Prophet's Prey (17 page)

So on September 7, when Steven left the house, Ross slithered through an upstairs window and changed the locks. Steven, unable to open the doors, called the Short Creek police, and officers Helaman Barlow and Fred Barlow showed up asking to see the court documents. Having already been through a similar exercise back when Chief Sam Roundy had simply ignored the documents, Ross demanded that his attorney be present before handing anything over. When he refused to change back the locks, the officers charged him with criminal trespass, cuffed him, and hauled him to jail. Steven Chatwin then climbed through the same window that Ross had used and reinstalled the old locks.

Lori Chatwin had recorded the entire episode on a video camera, and she called me while I was in the middle of a dinner meeting at the home of attorney Pat Shea in Salt Lake City. I could not break away, but I told her the audacious arrest would not stand. The following day, Mohave County authorities read the life estate ruling of Judge Chavez and dismissed the criminal charge. Ross was once again a free man.

Steven begged the prophet to let him move out of the house and get away from his apostate brother. He said when he was listening to Warren's recorded sermons upstairs on Saturday mornings, Ross would turn up his television set downstairs so loudly while his kids watched cartoons that Steven felt his family was being corrupted by Ross's evil ways.

When one of Ross's grandmothers died, he tried to attend her funeral at the meeting house. But Willie Jessop and other church security men were posted at the door to make sure no apostates were allowed inside to defile the service. Ross and his family were turned away.

He decided he would at least attend the graveside services to pay his last respects, and he took along his video camera to record the event for other family members. Willie Jessop was on guard there, too. He walked up to Ross and snatched the camera, shoving Ross away. But Ross was becoming adept at sticking up for himself, so he not only called the local police, who he knew would do absolutely nothing, but he also called the Mohave County sheriff's office and filed a theft charge regarding the camera. Within an hour, Willie was knocking at Ross's door, camera in hand, red-faced in embarrassment and too mad to talk. Willie handed the camera over and left without a word.

Several months later, in April 2005, Steven and his family were allowed to move out, and Ross Chatwin's house finally became his own.

CHAPTER 21

Mancos

As the fall of 2004 approached, I was trying to pick up the scent of the runaway prophet. It was laborious and painstaking work, but I had polished my investigative teeth as a bounty hunter. There are times to sit behind a desk and times to hit the pavement. This was desk time, and I spent hours combing through special computer databases available only to investigators and law enforcement. I would feed in names of the FLDS hierarchy and dates and license plates and other scraps of information and see what came back. Hundreds, even thousands, of hits might pour in, leaving me with the mundane task of eliminating useless data. It is not exciting work, but it is effective. The piece of information that can't be discarded is usually the piece that fits the puzzle.

Such was the case when I ran the name of David Allred, the original buyer of the property in Texas. An avalanche of hits came back. There were a lot of David Allreds out there in cyberspace, most of them having nothing to do with the FLDS, but as I began chipping away at it over the next couple of days, the stack became more manageable, and late one night an interesting connection popped up. Allred had a company called Sherwood Management, which had been incorporated in Nevada—a state notorious for allowing corporations anchored there to hide their officers and shield assets from prying eyes. Sherwood was cross-indexed to a piece of property that had been bought six miles north of the isolated little mountain village called Mancos, located in the sparsely populated Four Corners area of southwestern Colorado. I considered the equation. David Steed Allred, a confirmed FLDS moneyman, had been the one to establish the “hunting lodge” foothold in Texas. Allred and Sherwood were tied to the purchase of a pair of sixty-acre lots near Mancos for $1,394,000. It was time to get out from behind the desk and hit the road.

I gassed up and headed east. I had a feeling that I might need some backup on this trip, so I called Jon Krakauer at his home in Colorado. We had made telephone contact several months earlier, and I had grown comfortable talking with him. His book,
Under the Banner of Heaven
, had already been published and he had no intention of writing anything more about the FLDS, but his disdain for some of the group's despicable practices had remained, and he was fierce about wanting to help. He, too, wanted some answers, and he did not hesitate when I invited him to join me in Mancos.

We arrived at a hotel in nearby Cortez simultaneously, and actually met for the first time in a hallway while walking to our rooms. Jon has piercing eyes and is of medium build, and he is physically fit from a lifetime of mountaineering and other hard exercise. It would be useful to have someone who knew so much about the case, who could also watch my back. Over dinner, we joked that if the FLDS were to come upon us prowling around the Mancos compound, we might find ourselves under the next foundation they poured in Texas.

Before doing anything, we had to deal with a media leak that could jeopardize our plans. Flora Jessop had happened to call during one of my late-night research sessions on Allred, and I had made an offhand comment to her about the interesting data coming back concerning a little Colorado town. While trying to develop more information on her own, she had passed the discovery to a reporter in Phoenix. I am particularly wary about allowing the media into my investigations. Reporters are not paid to keep secrets. Some journalists had earned my trust; others had not. I had never met the guy Flora had contacted, so he was in the latter category.

He planned to broadcast a story right away, which could have torpedoed our whole plan, so Jon tried to make a deal with him. If he would hold off for forty-eight hours, we would give him exclusive access to everything we had discovered, and Krakauer, who rarely gives media interviews, would sit down and talk to him on camera. Just give us time to get there and look around, we asked, and perhaps serve papers on Warren Jeffs. Then the reporter would be able to break the even bigger story, with a famous author on the subject answering all questions. It was more than fair. In fact, it was a no-brainer. The reporter said he would talk to his producer. When he got back to us, he said a huge storm front was coming in and his producer wanted him to cover that instead. With the deal made, we could exhale and get a well-needed night's rest.

Jon and I were up early the following day to scout the property, only to find out the reporter and his crew had already been out there and filed a story at dawn from the front of the FLDS compound. It would air that night and his presence had tipped off the FLDS that their secret compound had been found. I was ready to chew nails at being double-crossed, and Krakauer telephoned the reporter to verbally whip his butt for lying to us. Unwilling to let him enjoy his exclusive, I called
Eldorado Success
editor Randy Mankin down in Texas, who also had been brought into the loop about the Mancos development with the understanding that he would not publish anything until I checked it out. Now, I gave him the green light to post the news on his Web site, www.myeldorado.net, and he scooped the TV show by hours.

Jon and I headed to the compound for some daytime surveillance. The only way to get a look at the property without being noticed was to skirt around about a mile to the north and go in through the woods. It had been quite a while since I had done any hiking, and I had a tough time trying to keep up with Jon, but—I kept reminding myself—he'd climbed Mount Everest.

When we finally reached a vantage point where I could catch my breath, I said, “Okay, Jon, if anything happens I've got my .22 pocket pistol and a .45 Colt with me. I'm going to toss you the .22, and you run for help and I'll stay here and shoot it out!” I was only half-kidding. The truth was that Krakauer could have been out of the woods and back with a posse and a cup of coffee before I had made it halfway back to the car.

We were able to get the lay of the land without being noticed. We spotted several parked vehicles around the area, but they were too far away to get their plate numbers. The fences were down around most of the heavily wooded property and it was hard to tell where National Forest started and the compound property began. We decided to return that night to see if we could get a little closer, then went back to town and enjoyed a pleasant dinner at a little restaurant that featured a big sign: WELCOME DEER HUNTERS. The season had begun in Colorado.

We returned to the forest when it was pitch black. Earlier in the day, we had heard generators purring in the distance, and the coughing of a tractor, but it was dead silent now, and there were no lights burning anywhere. Apparently the news had gotten back to them about the discovery, and a total blackout had been imposed. Jon was clearly in his outdoorsy element, clipping along in the darkness almost as if he knew the GPS location of each tree. He was my navigator, so I stayed close enough to make out his shape and listened to his footsteps in the darkness.

I was counting on him to get us close to some of those cars so that we could get a visual on the license plates in the hope that they might lead us to Jeffs.

Suddenly I heard the crunch of someone else's footsteps, coming from the opposite direction. I switched off my night-vision goggles to prevent anyone from spotting their faint glow. Jon was about ten feet ahead, too far for me to call out a warning without giving up our location.

The newcomer was within about four feet of me when he realized he was not alone. He snapped on his flashlight, shining it directly in my face. So I turned on my flashlight and put it directly in his face.

“Whoa! Who are you?” he asked, totally surprised.

Think fast, Brower.
All the talk about the violent history of radical fundamentalists came flooding back to me. Jon was far enough ahead that he hadn't even heard the guy until he spoke. Ignoring my earlier advice of going to get help, Jon returned to back me up.

The best defense is always a good offense. “Who are you? What are you doing out here?” I snapped back at the guard with whom I was having the flashlight duel.

“Take that light out of my face,” he said.

“Okay, take yours out of mine,” I commanded back, unwilling to give up any ground.

“This is our property!” He was a big dude, at least my size, a little heavier and at least twenty years younger. His comment confirmed he was an FLDS guard.

I needed to keep him talking, so I protested, “No, it's not. This is National Forest Service land!”

A little unsure by now, he admitted that the fences were down in some areas, and that maybe we had stumbled through one of those gaps. His tone changed. “Why are you here?”

For some reason, the welcome sign from that little restaurant blinked in my mind. “We're deer hunters,” I responded. I saw Jon's jaw drop when I said it.

The guard looked us over. “Well, how come you don't have any rifles?”

“You can't shoot deer at night,” I argued, sounding frustrated. “That would be illegal. You even get caught with a rifle at night you'll get fined.”

I explained that we had spotted some deer bedded down in the meadows earlier in the day and were trying to find where they might be feeding so we could come back at daybreak and fill our tag. The guard eased up a little. I asked if he had seen any deer around. He told me that there were a lot of them out in the woods and that he had seen some big bucks. By now, he was relaxed, so we had a little conversation about hunting, exchanged some pleasantries, then said good night and walked away.

When we had gone about a hundred yards, Jon looked at me and said, “How the fuck did you do that?” Bounty hunting had taught me to think fast, but this meeting was not quite over. When I had shut off my night-vision scope, I had stuck it in my jacket pocket, but apparently not all the way. It was no longer there and was too expensive to lose.

I told Jon that I needed to go back and get it. We both felt we had just dodged a bullet, but I didn't want to leave without my night vision. Jon pleaded with me to forget it, but I was stubborn and turned round and yelled back in the direction of the guard that I had lost my scope and wondered if he had found it.

The voice came back from the darkness. “Does it look sort of like a flashlight?”

As Jon and I approached, the guard had the scope to his eye, trying to figure it out. I told him I was using it to try and track the deer and gave him a lesson on how it worked. He was so interested that he asked how much the scope cost and where he could get one. We talked a bit longer, then excused ourselves once again and left, this time for good.

When we got back to the car, our nerves were still jangling. Then we laughed and the tension drained away.

By mid-morning the next day, I was once again at the fence line. Krakauer had had to return home. After the previous night's experience with the guard, I wasn't all that eager to poke around out there alone, but I still had work to do; I was walking the perimeter of the property with my camera and video-recorder when an all-terrain four-wheeler came grumbling through the trees. Opportunity or threat? The driver rolled to a stop and sat on the stuttering machine, staring at me.

“Hey!” I called out, as cheerful as could be. “Come over here and talk to me!”

He shook his head and stayed put on the John Deere machine. “You'll start taking pictures of me,” he countered.

“It's too late for that, pal,” I said with a smile. I put my cameras on the ground and walked over to the fence some twenty yards away, hands empty. “Come on. What? Are you afraid to talk?”

The slender man was not flustered by my goading. “No, I'm not afraid to talk.” He wore a nice forest-green jacket and a baseball cap. I could almost see his mind weighing the situation.

“Then what's the big deal? You're not going to get in any trouble, are you?” I tried needling him into action.

He turned off the engine and quiet enveloped the area. “We had some intruders out here last night,” he said.

“Really?” I kept my face straight.

“Yeah. We found some boot prints and I was out looking around.” He dismounted and walked over to the fence.

Introductions were in order. “I'm Sam Brower.”

“David Allred,” he said, and we shook hands.

He said he had heard of me. By that time, a lot of FLDS people had the idea that I was the devil incarnate. I believe both Allred and I thought that we had each made a huge find, and began fishing for information. The Mancos trip was not going to be a dry hole after all.

He was cordial when he got to talking, telling me stories about the natural beauty of the area, with which I agreed. He said he had enjoyed the winter weather, which indicated that he had been at the Mancos hideout for at least part of the winter months. When he said that only his family was living there and he was doing some remodeling, I knew he was blowing a smokescreen. You don't post guards at night for a little family get-together. And by this time, I had photographed the license plates of a number of cars in the area, some of which I would find were registered to FLDS members.

It turned out that they had become pretty curious about me, too. Allred and I played each other for intelligence for a while, but I knew he was too sharp to tip me off that Warren might be there. Had he done so, I had a subpoena folded up in my jacket, ready to hand over. Nevertheless, I had made a good contact, and I wanted to keep him on the line. I gave him my business card and said if he ever had any questions or wanted to know the truth about what was going on, just give me a call and I would tell him whatever I was at liberty to discuss.

That seemed to open him up a bit, and we agreed that it was a good idea to keep a back channel open, so he gave me his office number. It was a smart move on his part, because if I called, he might find out something useful.

I had gone into Mancos to verify a hunch and had come out on speaking terms with one of the top men in the FLDS. Sometimes you make your own luck. I would call Allred twice later during the investigation, and we chatted, but after that, he shut down contact.