Prophet's Prey (2 page)

Those video clips portrayed only a tiny fraction of the real story. For instance, neither cameras nor reporters had been present to deliver the shocking blow-by-blow when innocent preteen girls were led by the hands of their mothers and fathers to a massive temple complex at the ranch and placed into a ritualistic sexual union with the prophet Warren Jeffs himself, each girl just another in his series of underage concubines. Nor were the cameras there when other young girls were handed over by Jeffs to one of his many cohorts to buy their loyalty and silence. Many in the press, diverted by the images of distraught mothers, entirely missed the larger outrages perpetrated by the FLDS, the abuse of little girls born and bred to satisfy the church priesthood's seemingly insatiable appetite for underage brides.

The occurrence in Texas actually had its roots in the secluded FLDS town known as Short Creek, located in an isolated area along the Utah border known as the Arizona Strip. The church, under the direction of the prophet, owns and runs Short Creek and the lives of almost everyone in it from cradle to grave. Young girls are taken to the altar without even an elementary understanding of sex education or marital relationships with their new “husband.” Established families are arbitrarily broken up at the prophet's bidding: the man of the house kicked out of town, his children assigned another father, and the mothers ordered to take up intimate relations with other men. Unwanted young boys are literally discarded like trash along the highway in order to reduce competition for young brides.

In Short Creek, “education” is mostly a means of indoctrinating children with religious dogma, and the FLDS enforces its dictates by controlling all town services, including the police force, which pays no heed whatsoever to “the laws of man” if those laws conflict with what the police consider to be the laws of God or religious edicts imposed by the self-proclaimed prophet. Religious zealots and bullies sort out dissenters and chase away strangers on a more unofficial and occasionally violent basis.

Perhaps the most chilling example of how the prophet uses FLDS beliefs to control the community is found in the doctrine of “blood atonement.” Introduced by Brigham Young in the1850s but since disavowed by the mainstream Mormon church, this doctrine says that some sins are so heinous that there can be no redemption for those who commit them—not even redemption from Christ himself. The only way to obtain forgiveness for such a sin is for the transgressor to die, thereby spilling his own blood in atonement. Rulon Jeffs and his son Warren used the threat of this archaic rite for revenge and extortion against their own people. Who would disobey, when the prophet might declare that a disobedient act was forgivable only by death?

And the influence of that prophet is large. While Short Creek is their base, FLDS leaders have thousands of followers in secret hideaways and safe houses that stretch from Canada to Mexico, all of whom consider it an honor to help the leaders hide from the law and carry out their prophetic commandments, legal or not. The YFZ Ranch in Texas is just one of scores of “places of refuge” ranging in size from town houses to huge compounds consisting of thousands of acres.

Much has happened since the early days of my involvement, and my understanding of the culture has evolved considerably. My files now bulge with cases involving the FLDS and its practices, including rape, sodomy, extortion, child abuse, tax fraud, forced underage marriages, suicides, and kidnappings. It is, at its core, a very large, well-organized, and elaborately funded criminal enterprise. I found that hundreds of children make up a central part of the FLDS work force for projects from routine residential carpentry to fulfilling sophisticated U.S. government contracts, in clear violation of labor laws.

As I gathered evidence and interviewed witnesses throughout the years, I was always looking for the biggest piece of the puzzle, the “smoking gun” that seemed to be just beyond my grasp. Even when Warren Jeffs made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and was finally arrested on a lonely stretch of I-15 in Nevada, I still felt there was more to be discovered. Maintaining accurate records is encouraged in Mormonism, and I knew Jeffs had a compulsion for keeping an exhaustive accounting of his activities. In his case, it was also a matter of saving mementos of his reign as supreme leader, a trait he shared with despots throughout history. I knew that compulsion was his Achilles heel and increasingly I was feeling a compulsion of my own to find the trophies that he was driven to preserve to prove his greatness to posterity.

As it turned out, the smoking gun, along with frightening insights into the innermost thoughts, activities, and crimes of the prophet of doom, was there in Texas. Police discovered a cache of material, carefully hidden in a sealed, secret vault beneath the temple grounds, that consisted of Warren Jeffs's daily journals, the “Private Priesthood Record of President Warren Jeffs.” The information they contained was beyond anything that any investigator could have ever imagined or hoped for. There were volumes of documents, marriage records, computer disks and hard drives, audio recordings and flash drives, along with thousands of pages dictated by the self-absorbed prophet detailing his most deeply held beliefs, mad impulses, dreams, feelings, fears, and aspirations, often right down to the minute.

The find was conclusive and graphic, validating conclusions I had come to over the course of my own investigation and shedding light on many unanswered questions. What made this man tick? Who was Warren Jeffs, what was his magic, and what were his sins? Events and practices that had been assumed or guessed at could now be woven into a tapestry of facts dating back years. The darkest secrets and crimes within the FLDS were laid bare, exposing the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of Warren Jeffs and his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

At 11:00 A.M. on December 1, 2010, Jeffs was escorted by Ranger Hanna and a host of law enforcement personnel into a side entrance of the Fifty-first District Court in San Angelo for his initial court appearance in Texas. He was still wearing the gray sweatshirt, but his stripes had been exchanged for bright orange jail pants.

Judge Barbara Walther made Jeffs aware of his rights under the law and then asked him if he had an attorney, to which he replied, “I need more time.” The judge then gave him a 120-day schedule in which she made it clear she intended to have all three charges against him tried and sentenced. Taken aback at the timetable, Jeffs refused to sign a document acknowledging that he had been made aware of the court's schedule. It appeared that he was again falling back on his “answer them nothing” approach to the criminal justice system.

Still recovering from surgery and unable to witness the initial hearing, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that Jeffs had finally made it to a Texas courtroom. For more than four years, he had been bounced around among jails and prisons in four states, and he had been convicted by a jury of his peers in Utah in 2007 for being an accomplice to rape; but in 2010, the Utah Supreme Court remanded his case back to the trial court based on a technicality, so that officially, Jeffs no longer had a conviction on his record. Although there are still ancillary charges pending against him back in Utah and the Feds still have fugitive charges waiting in the wings, the indictments in Texas are by far the most serious. He is accused of being the actual perpetrator who sexually assaulted preteen girls, not just an accomplice to rape as he was in Utah. Based on previous trials of FLDS members, it is likely that DNA evidence will be presented, as will admissions in Jeffs's own words taken from his journal that will come into play as the magnitude of his crimes unfold in a Texas courtroom.

I began my work on the FLDS cases, ferreting out the facts and evidence of Warren Jeffs's atrocities, barely a year after he named himself prophet and seized control of the church, its assets, and its thousands of followers. I have spoken to hundreds of victims and witnesses who allege crimes and abuses at Jeffs's hands. Some of those victims were clients, some just wanted someone to listen to them, and some became my friends. I have combed and read through and listened to thousands of hours of sermons and documents, including nearly nine thousand pages of Jeffs's “Priesthood Record,” and I believe I have come to know the culture better than anyone not born into the group—and in some respects, perhaps even better than many who were. I know about the rampant child abuse that evolved into such an important part of the FLDS culture and caste system, and I know that the group will go to the greatest of lengths to protect their church leaders from having to answer for their crimes.

On December 5, 2010, the Sunday after Warren took up residence at his new home in the Reagan County Jail in Big Lake, Texas, I was perched atop one of the red rock bluffs overlooking Short Creek, my camera focused on the sprawling FLDS meeting house about a mile away in the distance below me. Judging by the number of vehicles packed into the parking lots and side streets adjacent to the building, the entire town seemed to be packed into its four thousand seats. The streets were empty, and in the three hours I spent looking down from my vantage point, I saw only a handful of vehicles moving through town. I found the silence eerie and a bit unnerving, almost like the calm before the storm.

I would later find out that Warren had been placing calls to the meeting house on Sundays from the jail's pay phone; he had actually been patched into the sound system and was delivering sermons. This allowed him to maintain control over his flock from the Texas jail. Lately though, those sermons were taking on a more ominous tone. Back in his element at the pulpit, Warren's voice took on the hypnotic tenor so familiar to his followers, as he revealed an event of impending doom. “Very, very soon,” the prophet intoned, “… two meteors will strike the earth”—resulting in a firestorm in which the wicked would be destroyed and the righteous would be lifted up and spared God's “whirlwind judgments.” He prophesied that the lost ten tribes of Israel would once again be reunited as foretold, and God would deliver His Prophet from prison and punish all those who had persecuted His chosen people.

As absurd as it sounds, thousands of people believe those bizarre predictions with every ounce of their soul, simply because Jeffs says it is so. I've come to the conclusion that the only chance to eliminate child abuse within the FLDS is if the church membership can be awakened to the fact that the man they call Prophet is a criminal and a fraud. But because they have been subjected to generations of mind control and subservience, I no longer believe that they have the ability to come to that conclusion independently. Realistically, the best that can be hoped for is that Jeffs will be held accountable for his crimes by spending the remainder of his life in a Texas prison. Perhaps with some time and distance between Warren and his dutiful followers, the latter will begin to develop the ability to think for themselves and make decisions on their own, without having to first seek counsel from their religious leaders.

For the time being, Warren Jeffs is awaiting trial in a Texas prison. I still find it astounding that, although he has been incarcerated in various locations in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas for the past four years, he has no conviction for any crime on his record. So for many reasons I will most definitely be in Texas to observe Warren's trial, and I hope that thousands of his followers and hundreds in the news media will be there to witness it as well. As one of my colleagues in Texas who is close to the case succinctly put it,
It's time that it all comes out.

CHAPTER 2

Ross

It began for me on a winter morning in the middle of January 2004, as I skimmed through the newspaper before heading to my office. An overnight storm had crashed through the area. The air in Cedar City would be clean and refreshing. Then a picture on the front page caught my eye, and I paused to read the story while munching a doughnut and sipping a can of V8 juice.

Everyone in our area was aware of the ongoing saga of the FLDS down in Short Creek and of its strange leader, the self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs. News coverage of the secretive Jeffs and his flock was usually sparse, but it had taken on a magnetic, soap-opera flavor after the prophet carried out an internal political bloodletting on January 10 by banishing twenty-one men from the sect in one swoop, and reassigning all of their wives and children to other men. The shake-up caused anxious authorities in surrounding areas to offer assistance to the Short Creek police in case there was a riot. Jeffs sniffed at such attention by the law and the media because he considered the actions he took with his large and obedient congregation to be a private matter—what he called “setting the people in order.”

Now he apparently was at it again, wreaking havoc on yet another family, but this time with a surprising result. The front-page photo was of a man by the name of Ross Chatwin, who was holding high a copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, William L. Shirer's account of Nazi Germany. I had read that book when I was a kid and had been fascinated at how an entire nation had lost its collective mind and followed a madman like Hitler into utter destruction. Chatwin was claiming the same despotic phenomenon was occurring in Short Creek with Jeffs, who in turn was charging that Chatwin had been booted out of the church because he was a “master deceiver.” This time, the expelled member of the obedient flock had said “No! I'm not going,” after being commanded to leave his home, family, and community. It was an act of defiance that just didn't happen within obedient FLDS culture.

That was when my curiosity got the best of me. Short Creek was only a little more than an hour southwest of my home. I decided to drive down and see if I could meet this unusual man who was standing up against the prophet, seer, and “revelator” of this strange religion.

Short Creek is actually two towns, in two different states, although they operate in most ways as a singular entity. On one side of the border, it is Colorado City, Arizona, while literally on the other side of Uzona Street, it is Hildale, Utah. Local residents just call the community “the Crick.” No one bothered me when I rolled into town, something I would soon discover was unusual, and I found the address of the Chatwins simply by walking into the town clerk's office and asking. The receptionist apparently was so shocked at fielding a question from a tall stranger wearing sunglasses and cowboy boots that she just blurted out the directions to 245 North Willow. Within a few minutes, I was sitting in my car before a clutter of lumber and drywall at a small home that was still a work in progress. My impulsive decision was bothering me: Was I doing the right thing by intruding unannounced on a besieged family in a time of crisis? I was almost ready to turn around and leave when a man stepped outside, the guy in the picture. His sudden, friendly greeting caught me off balance.

“Hey! How you doin'?” he called out. He was of medium build with a round, pleasant face and neat brown hair. The discount store sneakers, slacks, and long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrist and collar stamped him as FLDS. Almost everyone around Short Creek, more than ten thousand souls, belongs to or has been discarded by that one church, the only one in town. Everyone else in the world is referred to as a gentile, and gentiles, who seldom convert to rigid fundamentalist beliefs, are not welcome in their insular community. The children of Short Creek are taught to fear them and their world.

I gave a wave, smiled, and eased open the door of my four-wheel-drive, climbing out with care to show that I had nothing to hide and was no threat. I am quiet by nature, but a pretty big guy, and my size and appearance can be a helpful psychological deterrent to potential problems. I stand close to six-four in my boots, weigh about 225 pounds, and appear even bigger in the cold months when I wear a cowboy hat and a heavy jacket over bulky winter clothes. I have a mustache, and at times, chin hair; my eyes have a natural squint from working long hours beneath the harsh Western sky. “I'm looking for Ross Chatwin,” I said.

“Well, that's me,” the man replied, his gentle voice betraying not even a quiver of nervousness. Chatwin had been openly disgraced, excommunicated from his church, and deprived of his livelihood, and he was under direct orders from the prophet to leave his home, his wife, and his children. He was shunned by local businesses, had been abandoned by lifelong friends, and was being watched by the town marshals. In his own mind, he had done nothing wrong: Everyone, especially God, was still his friend. Few in Short Creek agreed.

“Mr. Chatwin, my name is Sam Brower and I'm a private investigator. I think I might be able to help you.”

It was a pretty vague reason for a big guy he had never seen before to suddenly appear in his driveway. Chatwin had been expecting some other visitors: thugs from the “God Squad,” the church-controlled local law and possibly a few unofficial enforcers who might be coming by to make him leave town.

He gave me a welcoming nod. “Well, then. Come on in.”

So I did, and by crossing that threshold, I set a new course for my life.

While construction of the house was under way, the Chatwin family was living in the unfinished basement, a chilly place with ribs of bare studs exposed against the gray cement walls. Once downstairs, Ross introduced me to his wife, Lori, a soft-spoken woman wearing a light blue blouse and a long skirt, with her wavy hair pulled back and braided. Their five energetic children tumbled about. Ross was eager to talk, even to a sympathetic stranger, and he opened up as soon as we settled around an old plastic laminate kitchen table. He was thirty-five years old, and had only about an eighth-grade education, which was not unusual in Short Creek. I would eventually discover that most boys were pulled out of school at about that age to work on construction sites, but even while in the classroom, their private-school curriculum was more focused on the history of the FLDS and an individual member's duties to the church and its leaders than it was on reading, writing, or arithmetic. The townsfolk had turned openly hostile toward the Chatwins, and Ross was selling used cars and working as a mechanic whenever he could rustle up work to support his family. The couple had been married for about twelve years and had remained monogamous—an unfortunate distinction in this fertile homeland of polygamy.

I understood that almost everyone in the town was a zealous participant in what they politely called “plural marriages.” Even as FLDS members smoothly lie to outsiders that there is no polygamy, multiple marriages are the norm, and there has always been a steady trafficking in underage girls bound for the altar. Ross Chatwin was not a polygamist, but he wanted to be one.

That, I found, was the real reason he was in trouble.

Until recently, things had been looking up for the Chatwins, as evidenced by their having been blessed with this unfinished home. The church owns all the property in Short Creek through its financial operation, the United Effort Plan Trust (UEP). One of Ross's brothers, as a reward for his faithfulness, originally had been given the little piece of land on which to build a house. When the brother turned against the church and left town, the church leaders reassigned the property to Ross. Prior to that, Ross and Lori had been living with their kids in something that was little more than a dugout house with a roof.

Delighted with their new lodgings, the Chatwins figured the time had come to bring a new addition into their family—a young girl who would be another bride for Ross and a
sister wife
to Lori. That, however, was not their decision to make. Only the prophet had the authority to decide who married whom, so by pursuing the matter on their own, they were treading on dangerous turf and teetering on the brink of heresy.

The forty-eight-year-old prophet, at the pinnacle of the FLDS hierarchy, could and did marry at will; and he had a large harem of his own at that time, estimated at about fifty “ladies,” a number that was growing fast. But for someone like Ross, near the bottom of the church pecking order, that option just did not exist, and he and Lori were concerned that busy and beleaguered “Uncle Warren” might never get around to assigning them a new wife. The most senior leaders of the FLDS are sometimes referred to as “Uncle” by other church members. The honorary title is meant as a show of respect and endearment, even if the man it refers to is evil to his core.

So the Chatwins began an almost antique flirtation with a sixteen-year-old girl, passing notes back and forth like moonstruck kids in a high school study hall. Lori kept the letters in a small cardboard box and allowed me to look through them. None contained any mention of passion or sex; most were just innocent “I love you. Do you love me?” notes. The girl they were courting suffered from severe health problems and was probably wondering about her own prospects of marriage. To the delight of the Chatwins, their prospective bride thought that marrying them was such a good idea that she suggested including one of her girlfriends. That could mean a
multiple
plural ceremony.

The Chatwins had foolishly hoped to spin the arrangement in a manner acceptable to the prophet, who, more than anyone, they believed, should understand how God requires a husband to have numerous wives while on earth in order to ascend to higher positions in the celestial hereafter. They could hardly have made a bigger mistake, and at exactly the wrong time. Only a few weeks earlier, Warren had successfully crushed troublesome opponents to his reign with the mass expulsion of twenty-one men and taken away their homes and families. Even before the dust had settled, this new challenge of an unauthorized bride had arisen seemingly out of nowhere. The manic Jeffs concluded that Ross was part of a wider conspiracy to topple him from power, so the prophet announced that satanic influences were being spread among his people, and then excommunicated Ross.

Ross was instructed to write out a complete list of his sins, which Jeffs would compare to a “true list” of transgressions that had been divinely revealed to him by God. It was an exam no one could pass. “My list of sins obviously did not match up with the list of sins that Uncle Warren put together,” Ross told me with a rueful grin.

On Wednesday, January 14, FLDS stooge and UEP trustee James Zitting drove out to the Chatwin place and delivered the final verdict: Ross was out. The order was crushing. He was no longer welcome anywhere in Short Creek and must leave his home immediately. Lori was to drop him, and even a good-bye kiss might jeopardize her own salvation. She and the children were to be reassigned. There would be no divorce, no custody hearing, and no due process of law; just the absolute command by the prophet to “leave [his] family and home and repent from a distance.” He was not to write or call or try to make contact with the family in any way but was required to continue paying tithes and offerings to the church. The girl the Chatwins had been courting would soon be married off to someone else.

James Zitting growled that he had come over just to deliver the ultimatum, not to listen to any explanations from the Chatwins. Ross replied that he fully understood.

“Good,” Zitting said. “So let's get doing it.” He left, believing his mission had been accomplished. I would later discover that Zitting had had a special reason for being forceful that day. He had recently been cautioned by the prophet to shape up. Fail in this task and he might be the next one gone.

The word spread swiftly throughout Short Creek not only that Ross had been excommunicated, but also that he and Lori were refusing to knuckle under. Lori was a most unusual FLDS wife. Although trained from childhood to be subservient and obedient—to “keep sweet” no matter what—she had a rather independent personality. She could be outspoken and assertive and her words carried weight with her husband. “I love him, not Warren,” she told a reporter. She would stick with Ross.

There was a small number of other so-called apostates in town who had gone or were going through the same painful process of excommunication, but who had not left the area because it was the only home they had ever known. The outside world was petrifying and foreign to them. The Chatwins would be joining this subculture of the dispossessed.

Ross explained to me what had happened next. Poverty-stricken and incredibly naïve, he had found an envelope containing some $220 on his doorstep over the weekend. Also in the envelope was a handwritten note asking Chatwin to mail copies of an enclosed letter to FLDS members who were still faithful to the prophet. He could keep any change left over from the costs of copying, envelopes, and mailing. “I guess whoever left the note knew I needed the money,” Chatwin later told a reporter.

So Lori and Ross had sat down and addressed envelopes to about five hundred people, and then he had mailed the letters. The text of the letter claimed that “Uncle Rulon” Jeffs, the late father of Warren, had appeared in a revelation to an unnamed dissident and announced that Warren was not the prophet after all! This bombshell of a letter claimed that an older man named Louis Barlow should be in the top position. Barlow was one of those who had been excommunicated in Warren's abrupt “cleansing” of the church.

Warren Jeffs is remarkably adept at monitoring and micromanaging almost every person, business, shop, gas station, and home in Short Creek, and it did not take long for news to get back to the prophet that Ross Chatwin was spreading unauthorized visions about who the true leader of the FLDS was.

Ross was not yet finished, for in this unprepossessing man, the apostates had found a spokesman with nothing to lose and a lot to say. They pitched in to help him stage a front-porch press conference on January 23, during which he stood before news microphones and charged, “This Hitler-like dictator has got to be stopped before he ruins us all and this beautiful town.” He also accused “Uncle Warren” of recklessly wasting more than one hundred million dollars of UEP assets, a portion of which was being squandered on building a secret new compound, a hidden place known within the FLDS only as “Zion.” Very few of the rank-and-file membership knew it even existed, let alone where it was.