Prophet's Prey (6 page)

For the man who personified polygamous unions, Johnson actually had encountered problems getting married for the first time. He recalled that when he was young, he had made proposals to many women. “They all turned me down,” he confessed to Joseph Musser, according to the official FLDS version. Musser responded, “Well, I will promise you this, Brother Johnson, you won't have to go out and solicit them from now on. They will come to you.”

Uncle Roy made his home down in “the Crick,” which had become incorporated as Colorado City in Arizona on one side and Hildale, Utah, on the other side.

Rulon Jeffs remained in Salt Lake City, as befitted a man of his stature: a professional accountant, founder of Utah Tool & Die, on the board of many companies, and president of an insurance company. He settled into a new home in Little Cottonwood Canyon outside of Salt Lake City. The main house, with columns at the front, sprawled over 8,300 square feet per floor, and featured two kitchens, twenty-three bedrooms, and ten baths, as well as the Jeffs's Sunday school, which had a baptismal font. An adjacent “smaller” place had another twenty-two rooms, and the entire property was enclosed by a huge concrete wall, a reminder for the rest of the world to keep out.

Warren Steed Jeffs was Rulon's miracle child, delivered two and a half months premature on December 3, 1955, in Sacramento, California, after a difficult pregnancy that jeopardized the lives of both the infant and his mother, Merilyn Steed, one of Rulon's four current wives. He kept his other three in hiding, spread out in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico to confound the law. Rulon was in Salt Lake City when he received word that Merilyn and the baby were in danger, and he rushed to Sacramento, arriving in time to actually help bring the boy into the world.

By itself, the birth could not have been regarded as a significant event. After all, the boy was Rulon's third child that year, and number fourteen overall, including the two by his divorced original wife, Zola. There would be many more children to come, but Warren would outshine them all. From his first breaths, Warren was favored by his forty-six-year-old father.

The spindly, far-sighted boy was born during a particularly turbulent time within the movement. Only two years earlier, in 1953, the politically ambitious governor of Arizona sent more than a hundred police officers into Short Creek to put a stop to the illegal practice of polygamy. Dozens of men were arrested and 263 children were swept into custody. The ensuing national publicity that included photographs of policemen snatching crying children from their mothers tilted national sympathy to the side of the polygamists, who claimed they were just an innocent religious minority being persecuted by an oppressive government. Like an ebbing tide, the Arizona government had retreated from Short Creek. The FLDS, however, never forgot the lessons of the “'53 Raid.” Although Rulon's base was in Utah, and therefore exempt from the Arizona action, the constant fear of government was the primary reason that he scattered his wives over several states.

Even as a child, Warren automatically had a special standing within the fundamentalist community through his powerful father. Some recalled him as a spoiled brat and a tattletale, the golden boy who could do no wrong. Beyond the walls of the family compound, however, the skinny and fragile boy had a difficult time. One of his aunts described for me the day during his first year of middle school when Warren had to go to the bathroom, but was too timid to raise his hand and ask permission. He wet his pants. The telltale wet spot drew the attention of other students, who taunted him unmercifully. Such incidents contributed to his already introverted behavior.

As he grew, Warren was petrified when it came to girls. When some of his brothers tried to drag him outside to talk to some girls on a visit to a relative's ranch, he broke down crying, ran away, and locked himself in the family pickup truck. Although fearful of personal encounters with the opposite sex, young Warren was definitely interested in them, just not in normal, healthy adolescent ways. By the age of eight, he already had developed a reputation as a voyeur.

I interviewed a female relative who told me that her household had a special routine they put in motion upon receiving word that Warren would be coming for a visit. All of the girls and women taped newspapers over their windows to prevent him from peeping in, and they stuffed towels beneath their doors because Warren would try to slide a mirror underneath in hopes of catching them in various stages of undress. “He was notorious for that stuff, even at that age,” she told me.

The host family could not scold the boy and order him to stop peeping. He was the favorite son and off limits to criticism, something that would become another lifelong trait. As Carolyn Jessop recalled in
Escape
, her penetrating book about her life in the FLDS, “No one stood up to Warren.”

While not the physical equal of many others in public school, he was brighter than most, and he graduated with honors from high school, skilled in math and science. Warren's graduation was perfectly timed, perhaps a little too perfect to be coincidental, because his father at that moment made a decision to build a private school specifically to meet the educational needs of the growing mass of children from fundamentalist families in the Salt Lake area. Too many things that were taught in public classrooms were religiously unpalatable and in stark contrast with what the kids were learning in their homes, such as the nonsense that man had walked on the moon. In 1973, Rulon Jeffs had one of the larger buildings within his walls turned into an FLDS school with a proper, fundamentalist curriculum. It was called the Alta Academy, and it would become Warren's launching pad.

Without a college education or teaching credentials, he was hired into the original faculty of the academy and was soon elevated to the position of principal, a promotion that carried an astonishing amount of personal power for someone who had yet to see his twenty-first birthday. Inside that building, the headmaster could do as he pleased, so he did.

CHAPTER 8

Lost Boys

One stormy afternoon late in May 2004, my cell phone chimed as I was driving down Main Street in Cedar City. The water was slamming down so hard that I pulled into a parking lot before answering. On the other end of the call was prominent Baltimore attorney Joanne Suder.

She said that she was looking for a private investigator for some potential lawsuits that were in the works involving the FLDS and that my name had come up as someone knowledgeable about their culture.

One of the first things Suder wanted to know about was my own religious beliefs. When I replied that I was LDS, her next query was whether my being a Mormon would create a problem in investigating the FLDS.
How many times have I answered this question?
In the minds of many Americans, if you are a Mormon man, then you must have a couple of wives. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

“I'm not FLDS,” I told her rather firmly. “I'm LDS.” Then I gave her the shorthand version of the stark differences, and I ended the lesson by saying, “The FLDS are no more Mormon than Lutherans are Catholics.” That made sense to Joanne Suder. She was a Roman Catholic and yet had played a lead role in exposing the rampant child abuse by pedophile priests within her own religion.

Suder was now setting her sights on abuses by the FLDS involving the so-called Lost Boys. I turned off the car and made myself comfortable. For the next hour and a half, we discussed one of the most horrific practices within the fundamentalist organization.

The Lost Boys are former FLDS kids who committed such outrageous sins as watching television, sneaking away to see a movie, or perhaps unbuttoning their shirts at the neck. Others may have been caught experimenting with drinking or flirting with a girl or having an attitude about something. Or perhaps the prophet may have seen them in a bad dream. No matter what the reason, such offenses are deemed not to be harmonious with how God wants them to behave, and the wayward boy can be excommunicated and literally abandoned by a roadside by his own family and ordered not to come back to Short Creek.

Girls are handled in an entirely different manner. A polygamous society needs a lot more hens than roosters. Girls, because of their potential as brides and child-bearers, are a valuable commodity. In almost any other town, the male-female ratio is about fifty-fifty, but the plural marriage system creates its own mathematical certainty; if the older men harvest the child brides, what is to be done about those strong sons who were raised doing hard farm and construction work? If young girls were allowed to choose who they wanted to marry, they would invariably pick husbands near their own age, cutting out the good ole boys and the aging church hierarchy. That would not work within the FLDS caste system. The gender ratio had to be turned on its head.

The first step was to keep all of the children, boys and girls alike, ignorant of sex education and normal marital intimacy. Sex was and is never discussed with FLDS children, and unless they grow up on a farm where they can witness animals breeding, they have no idea about sexual relations. Instead of receiving education, the children are admonished to avoid any physical contact completely and treat the opposite sex as they would poisonous vipers. For many a little bride, her first intimate encounter is in the form of abuse by her newly assigned husband.

The girl's parents hope to place the bride in a prominent church family, which would raise the status of “Father” (in the FLDS culture, the male parent is always referred to as Father) in the eyes of church leaders, resulting in more business and religious connections. A son always walks a much narrower path, but if he is obedient, finds some way to contribute, and is just plain lucky, he may last long enough to be assigned a wife by the prophet, and a plot of UEP land on which to build a house. Perhaps he will be brought into the family business, where his cheap labor can result in more revenue for church coffers, and again increase the social standing and financial prospects of Father. The new couple is expected to have children and their success within the group depends on their repeating the cycle of building wealth and prominence through procreation.

If the fortunate younger man continues to be obedient and contributes enough to differentiate himself from the pack, he may be blessed with another wife. That means more children, and suddenly he is considered the “Father,” and will sire even more male drones to work in the family business and more young wives to marry into prominent families.

Now firmly on the path, he may be assigned the important third wife, which is his ticket to salvation. FLDS doctrine teaches that it takes three wives to reach the highest kingdom of heaven. It also allows him to have still more children. Depending on how he plays the hand, and if he stays on the good side of the prophet, he will continue to secure his place in God's kingdom. The FLDS believe that the only way a woman can reach heaven is with her husband or “priesthood head,” so women are eager to ensure their place in eternity. If her husband is considered to be a less than stellar person by the church authorities, a wife is doomed to share her husband's fate and accompany him to a lesser glory.

The entire FLDS structure is supported by how many children can be contributed to the system, so the abusive cycle is repeated, time and again. The more wives a man is assigned, the richer he will become both on earth and in the hereafter. Women and children are considered chattel and the measure of a man's success.

The path is slippery for any boy trying to be obedient and climb the ladder of success. Church leaders, under the guise of religious piety and love, go to extraordinary lengths to protect the bride pool for the older men. The slightest misstep by a boy can be cause for instant banishment.

The age at which the boys enter the danger zone starts at about only eleven years and they remain at risk until adulthood. Extensive testing has shown that most of the Lost Boys are lucky to leave school with a third-grade education. Everything depends upon their obedience level and what kind of skills they can contribute to the hive. At a time when normal parents would give their kids extra support and work with them through mistakes, the church leadership looks for opportunities to expel the young offenders. They are mostly used as drones to be cast aside when their usefulness is exhausted.

Back when I worked on construction sites, I would see FLDS kids (some barely old enough to read a tape measure) unroll their power cords at dawn, work all day beneath a broiling Utah sun—totally buttoned up and wearing the traditional long underwear beneath their jeans and shirts—and not pack up again until dark. Most of their salaries went to their fathers. It is illegal in most states to have children younger than about sixteen or seventeen on a construction site, yet I have seen and photographed kids who appear no more than eight years old finishing concrete, driving heavy equipment, walking I-beams on the top stories of steel buildings, and working commercial construction projects. They are so short that the handles of the hammers dangling from their man-size tool belts drag along the ground. To me, it looked like slave labor. Banishing boys comes at a cost. The youngsters form an essential part of the FLDS economy, and their cheap labor helps FLDS businesses out-bid their legitimate business competition. But the threat they pose to their elders far outweighs their labor value and is constantly watched to maintain the proper equilibrium between males and females.

One boy who was only twelve years old recalled his experience for me. It was a story that I have heard far too often. He arrived home from a construction job, and Father told him to take a shower and clean up because they were going out to dinner. After a great meal at the Mark Twain Inn, his father broke the news. Uncle Warren had decided that the son was a “bad seed” whose evil actions were endangering the rest of the family. To protect the eternal salvation of his siblings, the boy had to be cast out not only from his home, but from the entire community before his evil influence could spread like a plague. Father already had packed some of his son's things. He drove him out to the highway and left him there with the suggestion that perhaps he could find shelter with another banished family member.

The boy also was given the same warning that I would hear repeated over and over, so often that it is burned into my memory: “Don't call: if you try to do so, we will not accept your calls and will hang up on you. If you write, we will destroy your letters without reading them.” One day a boy can be in the bosom of his community, protected by the prophet and family, and the next, he is out on his own.

It is hard to imagine the terror of a youngster without much education, and with very few coping mechanisms or life skills, deliberately abandoned by his parents and his church and flung into a world he barely knew existed and has been trained to fear and hate. But the FLDS has callously tossed hundreds of boys, mostly in their mid-teens, aside like garbage over the years to keep the church's perverted gender scales in balance and reduce the chance that a girl might lose her heart to someone her own age. A son can be easily replaced because the wives of the FLDS have been taught that their sacred obligation is to reproduce as quickly as possible. Many females produce twelve or more children within a fifteen-year time period. They are always churning out new generations. It is a baby mill; a human assembly line.

Being the son of an FLDS leader does not automatically exempt a child from being thrown away. As Warren Jeffs recounted in his Priesthood Record, even some of his father's own sons were cast out, dismissed with the words, “You are a bastard and not a son.”

The favorites are kept around and for some transgressions are simply told to repent and not to do it anymore. They are needed to replenish the family gene pool. It is a way of setting aside breeding stock, like prize bulls, in order to continue to replicate the family genome.

After our long phone conversation, Suder decided to move forward, and we agreed to get together in Salt Lake City for a face-to-face meeting. I was disturbed by the lawlessness that I was discovering in Short Creek, but I didn't know how long I could continue working without pay. I hoped my meeting with Suder would be more than just an information session for some attorneys who would politely thank me for my time, and that would be it.

I arrived at the Grand America Hotel, the best in the city, on a bright June day two weeks later, wearing my usual jeans, boots, a loose shirt, and an old ball cap. I considered putting on my Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, but I didn't feel a need to fabricate a facade to impress people. What you see is what you get. Besides, this was Utah, where my outfit doesn't normally draw a second glance. I called upstairs and a few moments later, a genial guy named Shem Fischer came down to meet me. He explained very little as we rode up in the elevator, although I could see him sizing me up.

Joanne was waiting in the luxury suite and the three of us made small talk for a while. Then she looked me up and down, as if noting that she was a long way from Baltimore. Having already tried a dark-suit-and-tie-guy private detective who hadn't worked out, she may have figured that a cow-country investigator might be just what was needed for the job. She smiled. “Well, I think we ought to hire you,” she said. “Shem? That okay?” I didn't realize until later that I was being offered not one paying job, but several, which would eventually lead to even more new clients!

Shem hired me on the spot to help with case preparation and serve legal process in his own suit against the church and its financial operation. He had been fired from Forestwood Products, a cabinet-making company in Hildale, after being expelled from the FLDS by Warren Jeffs, with the usual accompanying orders to surrender his home and his family. But when Shem decided to fight that decision, he chose a novel course by bypassing local and state jurisdictions entirely. Instead of taking the chance that the FLDS and the UEP might get the upper hand in a lower court, he filed a federal suit that alleged his First Amendment rights had been violated because the church had blacklisted him.

It was while working on Shem's case that I first observed Warren Jeffs's bizarre strategy in dealing with the law. After being humiliated on the witness stand in a child custody battle, in which he had expelled a man by the name of Jason Williams, Warren left the courtroom making the comment that he would never again subject himself to the laws of man. He
never
responded to legal complaints.

Warren preached that when Jesus Christ was questioned by Pontius Pilate prior to being sentenced to crucifixion, Christ “answered him nothing.” Warren equated all contemporary law enforcement with Pilate and trained the faithful to follow what he said was Christ's example and his own and avoid any inquiries by those from the outside world.

As a result, Shem Fischer eventually won his suit by default because Warren did not respond to the complaint. In years to come, I would marvel at watching the FLDS march from defeat to defeat in various courtrooms, most of the time preferring to lose rather than break Warren's firm edict to “answer them nothing.”