Prophet's Prey (29 page)

CHAPTER 35

Seizure

Bishop Merril Jessop was out of his league. After decades of intense internal power struggles, the FLDS had abandoned any pretense of shared leadership in favor of “one-man rule.” Warren Jeffs made almost every decision, but in this time of ultimate crisis, he was sitting in an Arizona jail cell, and the bishop could not reach him. The police were on the doorstep of the sacred temple and Uncle Warren was unable to call the shots. Jessop, the on-site ranch manager, was now forced to make decisions on his own, a situation that carried serious repercussions should the prophet later believe Jessop had made the wrong choices.

Jessop had to do something, because despite all of the dodges and lies, the police were connecting the dots as children and young wives were taken away for further questioning.

Meanwhile, Ranger Brooks Long was putting together an expanded search warrant to supplement the original one, a section of which vividly described why things were so complicated. Long told how a CPS worker interviewed a girl named Arta Jessop Barlow, who was pregnant and had a two-year-old child and claimed she did not know her own age. The worker then interviewed another girl, eight-year-old Viola Barlow, who contradicted that story. Viola said that Arta had four children and was not even sixteen! According to Viola, Arta was “spiritually united” to Richard Jessop Barlow, who happened to be Viola's own father. The mother of Viola was Richard's first wife, Susan Black Barlow. Arta was the second wife, and both were still married to Richard. That was only one of the many convoluted stories being uncovered—tales that were strange to begin with and were further complicated by determined FLDS efforts to deceive.

Ranger Long also was able to cite having personally seen a document that showed one man being married to more than twenty wives. CPS workers had interviewed a number of underage girls who were married to much older men, and some of those girls were already mothers themselves. Veda Keate had been married to Warren Jeffs at the age of thirteen and had conceived her child at fourteen. Veda was now nineteen, and her daughter was four. Around each corner, the investigators seemed to uncover a new piece of evidence that would alarm them even more, including the very notable disparity in number between males and females at the ranch: There were twice as many girls as boys.

With most of what they were finding, a new warrant would not have been required because the new evidence fell under what is known as the “open fields doctrine.” If a peace officer observes a syringe and a spoon in the back seat of a car during a routine traffic stop for a broken tail light, he is justified in conducting a more thorough search of the vehicle to look for other evidence of a crime unrelated to the original reason for stopping the vehicle. At the YFZ Ranch, police had crossed that legal threshold almost immediately upon entering the grounds.

After three days of searching and uncovering fresh evidence, their probable cause was building, and with the church leaders proving untrustworthy and deceitful, it was clear that the ranch was a hotbed of criminal activity. The police were now prepared to go after the temple itself and a smaller adjoining annex, and specifically any records and data that were stored inside. Long wanted the contents of locked safes, locked desk drawers, locked vaults, computers, and computer peripherals that may contain information verifying child abuse. There was overwhelming evidence that multiple incidents of child abuse had taken place on the ranch and a new warrant was prepared and signed by Judge Walther. This time the FBI also showed up with a warrant of its own.

Merril Jessop was still operating under an oath to “keep sacred things secret.” As bishop he probably knew what was inside the temple, and he understood that if law officers breached the inner sanctum, many of the church's most sensitive secrets would be at risk. But the doors were still locked, and while the kids and many of the women were gone by the night of April 5, the men were still there—loyal, dedicated, ferociously faithful men who would do whatever they were told. They would resist if called upon to do so.

But there was a counter-balancing force at work on Merril Jessop, an unusual woman I will call Lorraine to respect her privacy. Lorraine had been a wife of the late prophet Rulon Jeffs. After his death she was hounded by Warren to become another one of his wives, but she refused and left the church. She still maintained close ties to many of the people within the religion, people she had known her whole life and was anxious to help if she could. She had been invited to go to Texas to stand by as a sort of cultural translator and help shed light on some of the religious practices and family histories. When things began to heat up at the temple site, Lorraine remembered that she still had the bishop's number in her phone. As tensions escalated, she made the decision to try to contact and reason with the only man that had the authority to avert violence.

To her surprise, Merril Jessop answered the call. He did not want to talk to her, but Lorraine was persistent, and he was so desperate for guidance that he reluctantly listened. Lorraine became a calming voice as the crisis unfolded, urging Merril to carefully think through this potentially dangerous situation and not do anything rash. Don't let it turn ugly, she said. Since Uncle Warren was not around, Merril felt reasonably safe talking to Lorraine, and her warning carried some weight, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

As the cops prepared to enter the temple, the behavior of the FLDS men took on a more menacing tone. They spread out until one of them was positioned every sixteen feet or so along the perimeter of the wall that surrounded the five-acre temple property. They would periodically hold their arm to the square and pray loudly for God to bring down “whirlwind judgments” upon the heads of the police, the defilers, and strike them dead. Dozens of harmonized deep voices were begging for the Lord to intervene and punish the unbelievers.

The police cleared a path through the chanting men, who stood their ground and simply would not get out of the way. The cops wrestled a huge battering ram into position at the temple's massive oak front door, and the FLDS prayers for death turned into hymns, with a defiant, all-male chorus singing old Mormon songs of faith. The chant of the hymn “The Spirit of God” rang out as the battering ram smashed against the big door with a booming, cannon-like thunder. The ram was so heavy that officers had to take turns handling it, and the doors were so thick and sturdy that it took police more than an hour to break through. All the while, the FLDS men sang out and prayed, chanting for the destruction of the officers, their voices rising like a demented choir. Even some longtime policemen and Texas Rangers were shaken by the unrelenting calls for divine intervention. “Really weird,” observed one. When the door eventually cracked, the watchers moaned in shock and dismay.

The battering continued, and soon a second crack appeared, which increased the calls for God to rain down the ultimate punishment on the intruders. When the ram made a third large split, the twelve-foot doors flew apart with an echoing
boom
and the entrance to the cavernous temple was finally breached.

All around the wall, the men of the church collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut. Some dropped to their knees in disbelief, others fell prone and scrabbled in the dirt, and still others stood sobbing like children with their faces buried in their hands.

Loud, agonized cries ripped the air, the sound of shattered faith. Through a life of conditioning, the men immediately accepted their own blame; it was their own unworthy thoughts and actions that had precluded God's direct intervention from saving their temple. In response to other failures, such as when predictions for the end of the world had failed to materialize, the prophet had always preached they were at fault, being unfit for the Lord's use. Now, once again, the prophet himself, already in prison, would have to magnanimously shoulder the blame and suffer and atone even more for the sins of his slothful followers.

Most of the police felt sorry for the wailers, but there was no time to waste. They fanned out into teams for the temple search.

The search was long and tedious and each room, from the basement to the Holy of Holies on the top floor, had to be scoured for forensic evidence. The rangers had received intelligence from former members that secret passageways and hidden rooms were common in FLDS buildings, so the search meticulously plodded along in case something had been overlooked. Finally, one tired ranger went into an office and when he saw nothing unusual, leaned against a large bookshelf. He felt it give a little. He recalled the briefing about hidden rooms in other FLDS compounds and so he began to push and shove, then his fingers felt a latch, and when he freed it, the bookshelf came away from the wall. Behind it was a large door constructed of heavy oak with steel security locks.

The door led into a hidden underground passage with more, still heavier doors blocking the path. Along the way, rangers discovered empty gun safes, and tensions escalated considerably. Trained dogs would later be brought in to sniff around the property, and they located a cargo container buried beneath the home of Isaac Jeffs, the prophet's brother, containing thirty-three weapons stashed inside: pistols, Israeli military industry–made weapons, military-style Bushmaster AR-15s, and even a powerful Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle with a precision Unertl scope. All were legally registered. A cop who looked at that arsenal gave a low whistle and said, “They could have held us off for a month with this stuff!” Maybe having the cover of an armored personnel carrier as backup had not been a bad idea at all.

Meanwhile, the underground search had turned up some interesting file cabinets and the suspicious gun storage lockers, but no smoking gun. Continuing through the corridor, they moved into the area at which the temple was connected to the smaller temple annex and discovered the final door, a bank-grade Class 1 Hamilton safe door with a thickness of more than eighteen inches of solid steel.

The foundation walls were four feet thick and also were reinforced with steel, and together with the door, they provided a nearly impenetrable barrier. Whatever was behind all of that was well protected. Professional locksmiths were stymied. Workers hacked at the thick concrete beside the door, trying to create a hole, before realizing they would need specialized equipment to break through. Trucks bearing heavy-duty drills of the sort used on oil rigs were summoned, and roughnecks came along to operate them. A drill was set up outside the annex building and the roughnecks began grinding through the foundation at a spot identified on a blueprint.

The crews underground inside, and the crews outside above ground, worked simultaneously, and the outside group finally punched a small hole that they managed to widen enough so that a very small man might make it inside. Ranger Sergeant Jesus Valdez, small to begin with, made himself even smaller by removing most of his clothes, then, armed with a flashlight and his pistol, he wiggled in. The thick foundations had blocked radio contact between the two teams and when the drillers from inside broke through a short time later, they were totally surprised to look in and find Jesus Valdez in the vault looking back at them. Their first thought was that maybe the FLDS had stationed a small, tattooed man with a gun in there. It took a second for it to sink in that both crews had broken through.

Finally, in that sealed vault, the police uncovered the kind of evidence about which I had only fantasized: volumes of documents and marriage records, computer disks and hard drives, audio recordings and flash drives loaded with dictations by Jeffs, in his own voice. It apparently was being kept secure in the underground bunker until the temple vault was completely ready and dedicated. In that cache of documents was the daily “Priesthood Record of the Prophet Warren Steed Jeffs,” containing evidence that would almost certainly keep Uncle Warren behind bars for the rest of his life and lead to the incarceration of many of his lieutenants, as well.

Ferreted away behind those thick walls were the detailed day-to-day chronicles of his actions since first proclaiming himself prophet in 2002, including admissions of numerous despicable crimes. Now, those crimes would be revealed to the world.

By the time the searches were complete, a total of 463 children would be removed from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, and a dozen men, including the jailed prophet, would face a wide range of criminal charges. TV news crews descended on Texas, and the small town of Eldorado was overrun with news satellite trucks broadcasting the event around the world. However, the real magnitude of what took place that week would barely be noticed by most of the world. A Waco or Jonestown had been averted. The combined efforts of law enforcement, social workers, and former members who understood the intricacies of the time bomb ticking away within the compound had skillfully avoided disaster.

The patience and professionalism displayed by law enforcement and CPS social workers and investigators; the efforts of a former member to set aside the abuse she experienced at the hands of the FLDS leadership and persuade Merril Jessop to stand down; and a hundred other small details initiated by conscientious professionals on the scene, combined to avert a potential catastrophe on a scale the country had probably never seen before. Considering what the FLDS and its insane prophet are capable of and the violent history of fundamental Mormonism, the real story was how a catastrophe resulting in loss of life was avoided. While the fringe media began to spin a story of government intrusion into the lives of a supposedly eccentric unpopular religion, I breathed a silent sigh of relief that justice had prevailed and not one person had been hurt in the process.

Throughout the raid, Gary and I continued working with Flora Jessop in Utah, listening to our mystery caller named Sarah, who was still insisting that she was in Short Creek. Flora was able to get the caller's phone number from the caller ID feature on her telephone, and I traced it to a Tennessee cell-phone service provider. That did not guarantee finding any address, however. The number had been assigned to an over-the-counter disposable phone that could have been purchased almost anywhere.