Prophet's Prey (15 page)

Accompanied by his wife-scribe Naomi, and with his brother Leroy Jeffs and moneyman John Wayman, Jeffs took off from Mancos on Tuesday, January 27, 2004, in a two-vehicle convoy, a spacious Ford Excursion and a Ford Navigator. He claimed to be on another mission ordered by God, but in retrospect it looks more like a holiday from his troubles. The little group had only traveled across the rest of Colorado and part of Kansas before Warren started making horrendous pronouncements concerning God's “judgments.” Naomi recorded them: “There is such a dark spirit everywhere of great wickedness. The people on this land are only worthy to be swept off.”

In the cold of winter, Jeffs tracked back to the very roots of Mormonism. Upon reaching the environs of Independence, Missouri, he stepped through a carpet of light snow in fifteen-degree weather to explore the place that once had been set apart as the site for a future temple by the early Mormons, although none was ever built there. Jeffs had first seen it during a three-month coast-to-coast trip the previous year, when he was out sizing up possible places of refuge. The site holds significance to the mainstream Mormon Church, but Warren wanted to rededicate it in behalf of the FLDS. He stood tall with both his arms held out on the square and prayed for the Almighty to strip the land of its current population of hundreds of thousands of people, so Jeffs could build “the New Jerusalem and the temple in Jackson County, Missouri.”

It showed an evolution in his thinking. The FLDS had always clung to the idea that they were far beyond needing anything like a real temple, because they had lost the right to enter Mormon temples when they were excommunicated a century earlier. In the recent decades, however, prophets had made reference to the FLDS still not needing any temple, at least until after the end of the world, when everyone else had perished. Warren was now seriously thinking about that.

While on their trip, they also visited the Carthage Jail in Carthage, Illinois, where LDS Church founder Joseph Smith had been murdered by a mob on June 27, 1844. Warren repeatedly compared himself to Joseph, even claiming that he, too, would one day be called upon to reveal ancient texts that would become canonized into scripture. He surveyed the room in which Smith had been assassinated, saw the bullet hole in the door, and examined the window from which Smith had fallen. What image did he take away from that historic scene? “The room was quite small,” he noted in what would become a persistent, peculiar refrain.

Early on the final day of January 2004, a Saturday, the little caravan crossed the Mississippi River and hurried to Nauvoo, Illinois. The early Mormons, when driven from their homes in western Missouri, had reclaimed this once swampy land and built a thriving city on it. Then it was on to Ohio, where Warren's troop did some laundry before heading to Palmyra, New York, and the Hill Cumorah, where a large statue of the angel Moroni marks the spot where Joseph Smith retrieved the golden plates bearing the runes that created Mormonism.

But Warren was at a loss as to why God had sent him on this particular trip in the middle of winter. Something continued to gnaw at him: Why did God and the angels and saints appear in humble surroundings? In a fit of clairvoyance and characteristic hubris, he proclaimed in the Record that while God and His messengers sometimes did drop into modest places, the Lord really wanted “a temple where He can appear in honor and glory to His faithful people.”

After that declaration of God's true wishes, twisted to fit his own dream, Warren headed back west. The breakaway religion that had prided itself on never needing a temple was about to get a monumental one.

CHAPTER 19

There to Stay

The FLDS quest for secrecy in Texas would fail. Residents in and around Eldorado had not yet discovered the truth of what was unfolding with their reclusive new neighbors, but they did not like the rumors they were hearing.

They began asking questions of Schleicher County sheriff David Doran, an affable man of medium build with a mustache, and dark hair that is usually hidden beneath a cowboy hat. He was in his third term, knew his county well, and had been carefully watching the dramatic changes at the old ranch. Among those asking were his old friends Randy and Kathy Mankin, the publishers of the weekly
Eldorado Success
newspaper. Few outsiders knew more about the odd goings-on out at the ranch than the unflappable Mankins.

Randy was a hometown boy who had spent his younger years as a Texas oil wildcatter, a job that had taken him away from his roots. When he had had enough of the oil fields, he and Kathy had bought the newspaper and settled into what they had anticipated to be life in a sleepy small town. Then came the FLDS, and everything changed. The
Success
office was only a few miles from the front gate. In the months to come, Randy and Kathy would be reporting breaking news on the hottest story going. The little newspaper with about 1,100 subscribers would regularly scoop the bigger media.

The presence in town of the inquisitive newspaper ensured that there would be publicity when the mysteries of Eldorado started to unravel, which happened only two days before the end of February 2004. On that day, Ben Johnson, one of Warren's drivers and bodyguards, was stopped by a highway patrolman because the license plate on his vehicle was obscured. When a bloodied arrow was discovered, Johnson said he had been out hunting, and the patrolman summoned game wardens, who insisted on seeing the dead deer. Johnson had to take them onto the Zion property, where the visitors were surprised by the scope of the construction that was under way. Three multistory wooden buildings were going up among the scrub trees, and cargo storage containers littered the area.

Warren instructed presiding elder Ernest Jessop, who was in charge of the compound at the time, to lie and stick with the fabricated cover story. Jessop told the authorities that the workers there were merely an out-of-state construction crew building a private corporate hunting retreat. The materials in the big storehouse where the deer had been taken held food and other supplies for the crews and their families, he said. The game wardens took Ben Johnson, the archer, to court, where a two-hundred-dollar fine for poaching was levied by Justice of the Peace Jimmy Doyle.

The fine became a minor issue when Doyle declared that he was very familiar with the property; he was the pilot of a Piper Cherokee 180 airplane that frequently flew overhead, keeping a distant eye on them. Doyle had dug up information about unlicensed refrigeration and freezer rooms. Johnson quickly obtained the needed permits and headed back to the ranch to report. The “private hunting lodge” was not going over with the locals, and before long, Warren told his scribe, “The government officials of that county, Schleicher County, know of us.”

Early in 2004, the prophet and I were finally starting to cross paths. While Jeffs was planning Zion, I had just started working for Ross Chatwin, hoping to help him keep his house in Short Creek. Within a few more months, I would be deeply involved with the Lost Boys case and the rape case involving Brent Jeffs and his brothers. By the end of the year, Warren and I would be in each other's cross-hairs.

One evening during that time, as he was picking at dinner with some members of his large family, a wife approached and whispered into his ear. The prophet, looking angry, stopped eating. Another concerned wife at the table, hoping to console him, asked what the trouble was. “It's that gentile investigator Sam Brower—he keeps popping up where he's not wanted!” responded the prophet.

Unfortunately, I learned a hard lesson during that first year that Warren Jeffs and his FLDS had remained all but invisible to outsiders. It was difficult to overstate what was going on in Short Creek, and it was equally impossible for anyone who had not been there to understand it. One result was that even the various investigations into Warren Jeffs and his FLDS were fragmented. Somehow, part of my task became building bridges between law enforcement and child protection agencies in several states, and between the locals and the federal authorities. That was a far cry from what I had originally signed on to do, but the farther along I went, the less choice I had.

One of the capable investigators involved in this uncoordinated effort was Ron Barton, from the office of Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff. Barton had been doing a lot of digging, but he was hamstrung by orders to gather information without making waves. Nevertheless, he managed to pull together a lot of evidence of FLDS illegal practices, especially within the police department. But there seemed to be a lot of tension between Shurtleff and Barton, who left about the time I came on board.

I originally had entertained high hopes for Shurtleff, who had an impressive record as a prosecutor before winning the attorney general position in 2001. Shurtleff is quick on his feet and had a strong law-and-order stance. Here was someone with the clout to get to the bottom of what was going on in the Crick. But when it came time to prosecute on Barton's hard work, the AG didn't follow through, which frustrated Barton into resigning.

Barton was replaced by another state investigator, Jim Hill, who repeated the basic investigative exercise. Hill was in the middle of assembling more information when he, too, was reassigned off the FLDS case. He shortly thereafter quit the AG's office.

I liked Shurtleff; he is one of those guys that is hard to get mad at. But as the months progressed, I heard a lot more from the attorney general in the press than I actually saw him doing. I eventually came to the realization that Shurtleff was no different from any other politician, trying to back his own agenda. When we needed AG help the most, he seemed to pull back from the sticky situation.

No longer having a permanent home of his own, the prophet was wearing ruts in the highways of the West with his secretive travels, living in motel rooms when on the road and not near a hideout. He had found a new place of refuge, which he code-named R-23, in a forest some 4,600 feet above sea level in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and added it to his temporary nests.

No matter where he was, Warren was constantly working: editing and recording his Priesthood Record dictations to his trusted Naomi, preaching back to the meeting house by telephone, undoing some marriages, performing new ones, judging letters of contrition, collecting money, and micromanaging decisions on the smallest day-to-day details of his flock and the various construction projects. Women chosen for the refuges were instructed to stay close to their buildings and not to shop in surrounding towns, even if that required making trips over hundreds of miles to distant stores.

He always returned to Texas, where his masterpiece was being built. He traveled all over the ranchland and listened as the Lord filled in the temple's details for him. There would be four levels. A baptismal font would be placed in the basement, and the “telestial” floor on ground level would have light green flooring and seats. The carpet and chairs in the light blue second-floor “terrestrial” floor would be linked by a staircase of white carpet to the all-white “celestial” top floor, with rooms for a “School of the Prophets.” Warren secretly turned to the Internet to find out how the mainstream LDS church had designed its temples, and then he copied the results, saying they were God's special instructions to him. As the weeks passed, there were satisfying moments, such as when God decided on the kitchen tiles; there were also setbacks, as when Warren reported that the Lord rejected the materials for the drapes and sheer curtains upstairs. Apparently, no detail was too minor for divine scrutiny.

The most shocking order came when Warren directed the building of a special bed to be used in temple rituals. He said that God revealed to him during one of his heavenly sessions that it would be a special table of strong hardwood that would be placed in the most sacred area of the temple—the Holy of Holies. His specific instructions, entered in his record, called for a “… table on wheels that could be converted into a sturdy bed when the top was removed. On the right would be a cushioned prayer bench that could be folded away and hidden when not in use … The bed will be a size big enough for me to lay on it … It will be covered with a sheet, but it will have a plastic cover to protect the mattress from what will happen on it—and ropes.” A dozen chairs would surround it and a podium would overlook it.

“Something is going to happen in that room,” he predicted in his journal, then repeated it: “Something is going to happen in that room.”

On the second day of March 2004, Warren picked out still two more children to become his wives: Mildred “Millie” Marlene Blackmore, age thirteen, and Annie LaRee Jessop, who would not turn fifteen for another week. Their fathers were Merril Jessop, now a rising power in the FLDS, and Brandon Blackmore, one of the Canadians. The men, probably, had no objections, since they were not expelled from the church, thus committing various felonies with their silence in handing their little girls over to the pedophile prophet.

That night, Warren confessed to his scribe one reason for his compulsion to take immature brides. “These young girls have been given to me to be taught and trained how to come into the presence of God and help redeem Zion from their youngest years before they go through teenage doubting and boy troubles. I will be their boy trouble and guide them right.” In other words, he could brainwash, mold, and molest them to his liking. Naomi was usually assigned the task of training the new girls on how a “heavenly comfort wife” should behave. Using language that a child could understand, she told them not to be afraid, and to stand back in silence when their new husband went into a “heavenly session”—or more accurately, a revelation fit, which might consist of falling down and writhing on the floor or might evolve into a sexual encounter with one or more of his
heavenly comfort wives
.

At the end of March 2004, activist and child abuse opponent Flora Jessop telephoned
Eldorado Success
editor Randy Mankin and asked, “Hey, do you know about that place being built in your area?” The editor replied that he did, and asked what she had heard. The conversation ended with Flora announcing that she was coming down to Texas to hold a news conference and reveal that Warren Jeffs and his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were going to be the new occupants on that spread outside of town, the area's biggest construction project. Mankin ran a front-page story headlined, COMMUNITY SEEKS ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT NEW NEIGHBORS.

Nevertheless, David Allred, the official purchaser of the ranch property, stuck with the lie. He met with Sheriff Doran and a new face in the game, Texas Ranger Brooks Long, in the middle of April to assure them that it was indeed a corporate hunting retreat. But the busy editor Mankin tracked down longtime FLDS lawyer Rod Parker, who admitted that the compound was “connected” to the religion. As the story spread, the national media swarmed into tiny Eldorado.

That spurred government agencies to demand inspections on what was obviously developing into a huge project. Warren thought it was outrageous that others might consider the impact beyond the fence lines, because he had set a deadline of June 27 for completion of a new building that would become an interim meeting house. He believed that once the FLDS was forced to get official permission for everything, the timetable would be out of God's hands. Still, a host of issues needed to be addressed, from tax assessment to the sewer system and a planned cement batch plant, and despite the lack of building codes, Texas is very picky about the possibility of sewage or chemical contaminants polluting the water table and spreading downstream. Sheriff Doran, Ranger Long, deputies, tax assessors, environmental protection agents, and other public officials were calling for a visit. Warren blamed his flock for the situation, complaining, “We don't even have the faith to keep them away.”

Finally, a party of government officials arrived and were allowed to see the orchard and the wheat field and the garden, the well, and trailer homes—everything but people. The sheriff asked where everyone was and was told that not many were around that day. Actually, dozens of Warren's children and wives were on site at the time, separated and hiding in upstairs rooms under firm orders to stay quiet.

While traveling between Colorado and Texas on Saturday, April 24, the prophet was given an update on the government visit, and he recognized that the ruse was over. There was no way to hide the obvious any longer. He hotly instructed his front men to lay it out and let the Texans know “we are there to stay.”

Four days later, Allred met with Sheriff Doran and Justice of the Peace Doyle and admitted that the hunting lodge story had been false from the start. It had been needed, he said, to avoid media attention. The compound would only have about two hundred residents, he promised. That was a lie, too.