Prophet's Prey (20 page)

Even the prophet was impressed with what she said went on during his sleep. The revelations must all be true, because Nomes was a singular witness, right there watching, listening, and writing it down, night after night. She was the portal through which Warren was seen as a god, and he knew it. It was in his best interests to keep her happy, and so Naomi reaped the rewards of her transcriptions, be they fact or fiction. It was a win-win deal.

Darkness amplified the hedonistic partying in New Orleans, almost overwhelming the three FLDS explorers as they shouldered through the drunken crowd. Warren had led them all in prayer that they would not be “sickened” by what they were about to witness during this stern test by the Lord. Women kissed and touched in the streets. They stripped in shops that painted their entire bodies. Male and female nude dancers shimmied in bars. Restaurants overflowed with business. Some couples danced crazily with the women unzipping their partners and groping in public. People with cameras took pictures of every lewd act, and police wandered around almost aimlessly. Huge loudspeakers boomed deafening bass beats. Women fainted, drunks fell. As revolting as it was, God kept sending Warren and his two wide-eyed men back to be witnesses to the immorality of the world.

As Warren watched it all he appealed to God to “destroy this wicked generation,” he would recall. He leaned against a wall, raised his arms to the square and delivered the revelers over to the judgments of God. When the three men eventually returned to the hotel, Naomi pulled the couch away from the door to let them in, and Warren got busy on the phones to set up the schedule for Sunday school back in Texas and Utah.

After obeying the Lord's command to witness some more sinful behavior on the room's television set, they tried to get some sleep, although a man and woman had a loud fight in the adjoining room at four o'clock in the morning. The Lord ordered Warren to stick around for another night so that he could actually witness more of the city's sins.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast six months later, on August 29, devastating the city and leaving more than 1,800 people dead, the prophet was convinced that he had literally summoned down to this place of sin one of his oft-sought whirlwind judgments from God.

CHAPTER 24

Candi

The chill of winter still gripped the high desert and I was looking forward to taking some time off on a Saturday in April 2005, a foolish hope on my part. The phone rang and Gary Engels's name flashed on the caller ID. I always answered his calls. If some FLDS zealots had flipped out and were after him, I was the closest reliable help. He would do the same for me; it was an unspoken agreement.

“Hey Sam, guess what?” Gary sounded excited, rare for him.

“What?”

“You remember that girl, Candi, who was married to one of Joe Barlow's sons when she was sixteen?”

Vaguely. “Kind of. Why?”

“Well, I got her phone number. She's living over in St. George. We should probably give her a call and see if she'll talk to us. Her sister seems to think she will. I guess she really hates the guy she was married off to, and she is pretty pissed at Warren for forcing her into it.”

We had heard so many of these stories that it was hard to keep track. “Who's the sister again?”

“Tammy Shapley. She's Joe Holm's girlfriend; Richard's nephew's girlfriend,” said Gary. The names were tumbling into place, another strand of somebody related to somebody else, knowing still somebody else. “Do you think we should give Candi a try? She probably won't talk, but you never know.”

I had learned to seize any opportunity when it came to the FLDS. Drag our feet and a guilty conscience might kick in and prevent our potential lead from talking, or the Warrenites might find out and it could be over before it ever really began. “Yeah. Give her a call right now. If she agrees, I can be down there in forty-five minutes.” We had no way of knowing that we were on the verge of our biggest breakthrough yet.

Gary and I had befriended an ex-FLDS businessman and former Colorado City councilman named Richard Holm, who hated the prophet so fiercely that he referred to Warren on national television as “a dirty, rotten bastard” and would refer to the Jeffs's compound in Short Creek as “that brothel up the street.” Warren had kicked him out of the church in 2003 and reassigned his family to Richard's own brother, Edson. After several months, Richard went to see his children, who no longer referred to him as Father; they just called him Richard. The reassigned wife told him she was already pregnant with his brother's child. To say Holm was bitter would be an extreme understatement.

We had recently attended a small party for FLDS refugees at Richard's house, where we had met one of his nephews and the young man's girlfriend, Tammy Shapley. The conversation had veered to the subject of Tammy's sister, Candi, who Tammy said had been forced to marry “a real asshole” at the age of sixteen. Candi had run away, but her brothers had been dispatched by her father to find her and they had brought her back. She eventually ran away again and made it out for good by finding a boyfriend and having sex with him. Once tainted by “adultery,” although there had been no legal wedding in the first place, she was considered sullied goods, her FLDS “husband” no longer wanted her, and she was drummed out of the fold, never to return. She was another refugee who preferred to stay in the area rather than go out into the real world.

When Tammy had told us that Candi might be willing to talk, Gary and I had exchanged glances. Was this a real lead or just another dead end? It deserved a try, however, and Tammy had soon forwarded the needed telephone number through Richard.

It worked. After our initial conversation, Gary phoned back to say the girl would see us. I hit the road from Cedar City to St. George and linked up with Gary.

Less than an hour later, we pulled up in front of Candi Shapley's town house, feeling a push of anticipation. She answered the door herself. I found her to be a personable and pretty young woman, still only nineteen, with bright red hair and a little overweight from recently having had twins. She had a bit of fire in her eyes, still angry that no one had listened to her when she claimed she had been raped and brutalized by her FLDS husband. Within minutes, she was telling her story. She had waited a long time to be heard.

Her tale could have been an FLDS primer. Candi grew up in a twenty-bedroom, sixteen-bathroom home with her father, his six wives, and most of her fifty-six siblings. She was taught to keep sweet and prepare to be a good wife and bring children of her own upon the earth.

Her trouble began when one of her sisters turned seventeen and told their father she was ready to be “turned in,” the term for being placed with some worthy priesthood holder as a wife. Her father gave his approval and an appointment was made for the girl to be interviewed by the prophet, who would choose a suitable candidate. Candi, who had just turned sixteen, went along to keep her sister company. Warren took it upon himself to add Candi to the list of brides-in-waiting.

Soon, her father happily informed Candi that she would be married the very next day. He did not know anything about the groom other than that he was a member of the large Barlow clan. Candi's life was catapulted in an instant from her comfortable day-to-day routine into a supersonic ride into the unknown. She had not seen this coming, and she was scared.

Another friend and valuable resource would later fill in for me what happened next. Carolyn Jessop, who eventually left the cult and ripped the lid off many FLDS secrets with her bestselling book
Escape
, was managing the Caliente Hot Springs Motel in Nevada at the time. Her husband, the powerful FLDS functionary Merril Jessop, owned the motel on State Road 93, and it had become a favored hideout in which Warren Jeffs would perform multiple marriage ceremonies. Secrecy was paramount. No matter the age of the bride-to-be, crossing interstate boundaries for illegal sexual purposes is a serious crime covered by the federal Mann Act. Some underage brides were transported down from Canada, making it an international crime as well.

The routine Carolyn described was very cloak-and-daggerish. The day or night before a set of marriages was to take place, she would receive a call to set aside a number of rooms, and the reservation would be confirmed the following day. The tipoff for Carolyn was if Room 15 was among those to be reserved. Room 15 was a boxy little bungalow that sat alone near the office and was the place where the marriages were always performed.

Each designated new bride would be assigned one of the other rooms and would stay inside with her family until it was her turn. Her groom, the priesthood holder, might wait outside in his truck. Then both would be summoned to Room 15, which was decorated in pink, and the ceremony would be quickly conducted. The new couple would then usually drive off to their new lives while another couple would be called in for the next arranged marriage. Room 15 was a wedding assembly line for underage girls.

That was exactly what faced the bewildered sixteen-year-old Candi Shapley. Candi told us that she was taken to Room 15 and stood beside Randy Barlow and Randy's first wife, Valene, and his mother. Randy was twenty-eight-years old and had children by Valene, and although Candi had seen him around Short Creek, they had never spoken. Warren Jeffs performed the ceremony as Uncle Rulon Jeffs watched, and afterward Uncle Rulon croaked out a blessing.

I leaned back in my chair and quietly exhaled as she spoke, glancing over at Gary. This was huge. We were talking to someone who could personally testify that the prophet had married her off, knowing she was sixteen, to a man twelve years her senior. The fact that she had been shuttled to another state to avoid detection verified that a crime had probably been committed.

Candi said that as they drove away from Caliente Hot Springs, she was apprehensive and confused. She did not even understand why she had had to travel all the way to Nevada just to get married although her father had told her there was a law against plural marriage in their home state of Utah. The real reason was that the Caliente motel marriage factory drew no attention from outsiders, there were controls on who would attend, and it was a safe hideaway for the secretive prophet; Short Creek was too public. Her only comfort was that her father had also promised her she had the right to say no if she did not want to have sex with her new husband. Candi resisted for as long as she could because anything to do with sex was entirely foreign to her, and when Randy finally made his move, she refused.

The spurned husband bided his time and even met with Warren to complain that his young bride did not want to have children yet. The prophet instructed her husband to find a way. The next time, when she again resisted, she said Randy pinned her down and raped her. Later, she claimed he raped her again. Taking her problem to Warren did not help. The prophet told her the way to make things better was to become more obedient and have children. Feeling helpless, she submitted, but things only got worse. She would confide to me later that Randy was a brute who treated her like a slave and forced her to engage in group sex with him and another woman.

By the time we left the initial meeting with Candi, we could see potential criminal charges all over the place, as well as a possible witness in our civil racketeering case. Candi's testimony could send both Warren Jeffs and Randy Barlow to prison. In this case, the wedding was a sham not only because Candi was underage and Randy was already married, but also because Warren, who performed the sexual arrangement, had no lawful authority to marry anyone.

To be a witness in a sexual abuse case is difficult, and it takes a very brave woman to carry through to the end. But I headed home to Cedar City feeling optimistic. I liked Candi. Maybe we finally had found someone ready to take it all the way. Maybe not. I rated it fifty-fifty at best.

Fred Jessop, the genial Uncle Fred, had been missing for more than a year, ever since Warren had stripped away his position as bishop of Short Creek and forced him into hiding. At the age of ninety-three and in failing health, Fred had disappeared in the middle of the night, and he was said to have been sent on a special mission.

Information about what had happened was sparse. People who had been at the house the night Fred was shuttled off told me that a crew had been assigned to remove his belongings. Things he could use the most, such as clothes, were left behind, while items of value that he had amassed over his long lifetime disappeared. Will Timpson, the new bishop, moved into the house the day after Fred disappeared.

There are a lot of Jessops around, and the family tree is so strange that I did not find it unusual when I accompanied Joe C. Jessop Jr., who was the combination son, grandson, and nephew of Uncle Fred, to the Washington County sheriff's office in the spring of 2005 so that he could file a report placing the former bishop into the National Criminal Identification Center's computerized federal database as a missing person. Other family members who were no longer in the FLDS were worried about him and feared he would not last long without appropriate medical care.

Uncle Fred, who had personally known five of the nine prophets, was very sick, totally dependent on others, and cowed in his old age by Warren. He had been turned into a perfect yes man, the ultimate loyalist, as his health failed.

“Uncle Warren is an Enoch. He is a Moses!” Fred had praised in a sermon. “He told us once he knew what Noah went through. He is a revelator like the Prophet Joseph, a colonizer like Brigham Young, one who lives in hiding like John Taylor … All of those Prophets are centered in Uncle Warren now.” That was about the highest endorsement anyone could give. As the months passed, Fred slipped so completely off our radar that I didn't know if he was alive or dead. Very few people did.

Warren took a personal interest in the care of the ailing Uncle Fred, who was suffering from heart and kidney problems, was diabetic, and needed an oxygen tank to breathe. He insisted Fred's ladies were to give him only special bottled water, yarrow tea, and garlic drinks. Such instructions made it unclear to me whether Warren's intentions were meant to help or hurt the ailing old man.

In early March 2005, hidden away in Texas by Warren, Fred's health took a turn for the worse. Two wives who were nursing him alerted the leadership, but instead of being immediately moved into a hospital, the frail old counselor was ordered to be driven to another hideaway in distant Albuquerque, New Mexico, about nine grueling hours by car. The paranoid prophet wouldn't take the chance of that illness leading authorities back to Zion and ultimately to himself. According to Warren's journal an FLDS doctor secured some medicine from prescriptions he wrote for people in Short Creek, and he was assigned the task of escorting Fred, along with two other couriers, on the cross-country journey that would surely end in the old man's death.

Once they were settled in New Mexico, another wife pleaded that he be taken to a hospital immediately, and she was scolded for her lack of faith and for assuming to know more than the prophet, who was back in Texas, praying and ordering them to sit tight and wait to see whether Fred improved.

Fred's inability to get medical attention was not unusual within the FLDS. It was never easy to get permission to go to a hospital, where a vulnerable patient would face questioning authorities and might inadvertently expose some sort of illegal activity back home. Permission had to come directly from Warren.

But Fred was not the only thing on Warren's plate. Fresh off their eastern swing, he told Naomi that he was feeling the call to go to some foreign country and wanted maps of England, France, and Germany.

While Fred was languishing in Albuquerque, Warren received another revelation and the old man was put on the road again, transported farther north, into Colorado, once again depriving the dying old man of much-needed medical attention. As the little convoy of two vehicles neared Denver, it seemed as if the venerable old church legend might die right there in the car. Permission finally was given to hospitalize him at the Sky Ridge Medical Center, about twenty miles from downtown Denver. He was placed in the intensive care unit, and the church's doctor, Lloyd Barlow, reported back to Warren periodically. (Lloyd Barlow was later indicted in Texas for failure to report child abuse.) The hospital staff was warned that Fred's only chance for survival was to have a stent surgically placed to stabilize his heart and then undergo arthroscopic surgery to repair a valve. About that time, Warren had another vision, which often happened when he needed to justify his actions. This one showed Uncle Fred getting into a car and going away to visit his family, but leaving Warren behind. The prophet was left with the impression that once Fred died and was on the other side of the veil, their work could continue faster than before. He instructed the doctors to make Fred as comfortable as possible but to take no other medical actions.