Prophet's Prey (19 page)

Rumors were circulating that it was to be a temple. To most untrained observers, it was just another manifestation of Warren's eccentricities; but to me, it was evidence that Warren was taking his revelations of doom to the next level. Previous FLDS leaders had always been very vocal about not needing a temple, at least until the end of the world. I considered the sudden emergence of a temple to be significant, and worrisome.

Nothing happened over Christmas in 2004, but Jon Krakauer and I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that something was up. We devised a plan to split the New Year's duty and try to cover all of the bases. Gary Engels and I could keep an eye on Short Creek because we were invited to a New Year's Eve party there at the home of Marvin Wyler, the father of Ross Chatwin. Marvin also had been tossed out of the church but, like a handful of others who had been excommunicated, he refused to leave Short Creek. Jon volunteered to travel to Eldorado and check out the Texas compound.

The party was a rare opportunity for Gary and me to meet some more of the increasing number of FLDS refugees in a social setting as opposed to formal interviews. No longer having to abide by the onerous rules laid down by Warren Jeffs, they could celebrate the holidays as they pleased. We were surprised to find that the gathering had grown into a large event. About sixty people—representing most of the excommunicated and isolated families in the area—dropped by Marvin's well-worn house on the Arizona side that night.

Gary and I had grown accustomed to being vilified in this town, and it was pleasant to be able to just relax a little with people who knew that we were on their side. Presents were exchanged, and at midnight, the kids shot off fireworks. Some people in Short Creek were actually having a good time! That scared the heck out of the cops. Police cars circled the house seventeen times in the space of one hour, looking for a reason to stop the party, but no laws, not even their made-up kind, were being broken. Fireworks were not illegal in the state and the streaks of sparks in the night and the firecracker pops made the house seem like a little oasis of merriment as the rest of the town hunkered down, dark and fearful. I was given a thick glass drinking mug decorated with ribbon and filled with home-made candy.

We stood out as oddities, of course, but everyone wanted to shake our hands and ask what was going on with the legal side of things. They were curious about the missing prophet. Those at the party didn't know where he was either.

Jon Krakauer awoke before dawn on the first day of 2005 and a short time later was strapped into the passenger seat of Jimmy Doyle's small airplane, flying out to the Texas site. As they approached, they saw activity down below at the ranch, but they were too high to make out details. As Doyle swooped the plane down for a closer look, Krakauer grabbed his camera and began snapping pictures.

On the ground, panic ensued. People scattered, jumping into cars or heading for the tree line. A large black Suburban sped off. In moments, the place was clear, except for the big foundation footings that had drawn our attention in the first place.

Later that same day, Jon downloaded the images onto his computer and studied the details. We had guessed right; the FLDS had picked a major holiday on which to dedicate the new foundation, betting that no curious outsiders would be around. They had gathered in a prayer circle, and in clear view, standing right in the middle, was a long, lanky figure: Warren Jeffs. It was Warren who had piled into the SUV at the approach of the aircraft. He later expressed his displeasure at being caught in the middle of the prayer circle and blamed the interruption on workers who had not removed some concrete forms, and were thus responsible for delaying the dedication on the Lord's scheduled time. Warren noted that he had intended to depart the site by 6:30 A.M. Jon had caught him by only a few minutes. Uncle Fred, wheezing and on oxygen, was also there.

It was a great way to start 2005. This was the first Warren sighting in many months, and it meant that he had not fled to Canada or Mexico as rumored. He was around, close enough to participate in activities at the compound. FLDS ranch spokesman Merril Jessop had been lying when he had said that Warren never went there. In fact, according to the journal, once the plane had departed and the morning sky was again safe, Jeffs and his followers returned to the site and finished blessing the foundation before he sped off on his next road trip.

CHAPTER 23

Wicked

Heavy framework started going up at the Texas temple site a few days after the hide-and-seek dedication ceremony. Only then did I start to get a feel for the size of the new building. As temple workers laid sheets of plywood for the first floor, I began making estimates of the size of the structure. It was going to be at least 17,000 square feet on each of three floors, and they were sparing no expense on the quality of building materials. Millions of dollars worth of mining, rock cutting, and construction equipment was brought in to extract the low-grade limestone from the ground.

Under Warren's alternating whips of blessing and condemnation, construction went with lightning speed. Nobody can build faster than a troop of motivated FLDS builders who are convinced they are working for their very lives and the prophet.

Jeffs's journal would show that he constantly babbled directions: precise dimensions for a thirty-foot-tall tapered tower to go atop the three-story building, double insulation in the walls, darkly tinted windows. He had a mental vision for every inch of the building. But Warren was not one of those sweat-stained kids that the FLDS consigned to learn the building trades instead of going to school. He had none of their construction skills, nor did he possess the necessary architectural training. His design plan came through his fevered revelations, which meant some of it was impossible to carry out. That did not stop him from giving orders.

When some irregularly shaped walls that he had dreamed up did not turn out as envisioned, he ordered Rulon Barlow, who was in charge of the framing, to double his crew and make it right.

Barlow, an experienced hand, explained that they were in the middle of putting up windows, but Warren again firmly ordered him to fix the walls instead. “I started helping them, carrying the sheeting that covers the outside of the wall,” Jeffs would recall. He wanted to see to it that the job would get done.

Then Barlow, holding his nail gun and standing next to Warren, made the terrible mistake of asking the prophet, “Will you get me my nails in that box right there?” Jeffs stiffened, but handed him the few remaining nails.

Rulon Barlow might have thought he could get away with such a liberty because the two men were related through the barter system. Barlow had gotten the prestigious foreman position among the temple builders at the ranch, while Warren had been given the Barlows' thirteen-year-old daughter as a bride. Within a year, she was pregnant. Therefore, Rulon Barlow was one of Warren's many fathers-in-law, although he was a decade younger than the prophet. Technically, he deserved some respect. He got just the opposite. “I detected through the spirit of God that this man delighted in directing me,” Warren complained in his journal.

That night, Jeffs had a vision that Barlow no longer held priesthood and would have to be expelled from Short Creek, along with his family.

Asking for a handful of nails had cost Rulon Barlow everything.

Warren was laying plans for more than just routine construction. One of the last men the church had allowed to go off to be educated by outsiders had obtained a degree in electrical engineering before returning to the fold. He gradually was elevated into higher positions within the secret confederation of men and women found worthy of being “temple builders.” That required an oath of secrecy that read in part, “For and in behalf of the Lord and Our Prophet; I do willingly enter into this covenant with the Lord to keep sacred things secret and not reveal what I hear in this training to anyone except by the Prophet's immediate direction.”

He was instructed to build a high-tech thermostat that could take an incinerator up to an astonishing 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. As he worked, the engineer grew concerned about the ultimate use of the device, because that temperature was much higher than needed for almost any commercial application. He knew that even a crematorium operates at between 1600 and 1800 degrees to completely consume human bodies.

When the leaders would not tell him the purpose, the engineer quit, and he was soon expelled from the church.

Sheriff David Doran would eventually question Bishop Merril Jessop about the super-furnace, and he was first told that it was to be used to make some gold fixtures for the temple. But the melting point of gold is just 1900 degrees, so Jessop changed his story; they were developing a powder-coating operation, although that could be done at about only 700 degrees. The third time around, Jessop said he was not sure why the powerful furnace had been built, but that probably it would just be used to burn trash.

Although no one can say for certain, in my opinion, the existence of a high-tech extreme-temperature furnace operation in the hands of a man with the mental and emotional instability of Warren Jeffs, who talked of blood atonement and made end-of-the-world proclamations, could be a dangerous thing. The idea of using it just to burn garbage seems ridiculous.

I was unable to come up with a rational answer to the question of why Warren was secretly building such a futuristic piece of equipment. Was there some kind of evidence that could only be destroyed at very high temperatures? If so, what could it be? That Merril Jessop could not come up with a plausible explanation bothered me. The question has never been satisfactorily answered.

“What do we do about the Walter Steed case?” the prophet asked of his counselors in February 2005. Still another attack had come at them, this one launched in a complaint to the Utah Judicial Conduct Commission against Hildale Justice Court's Judge Steed by an antipolygamist group known as Tapestry Against Polygamy. As implied by its name, Tapestry had been formed by a coming-together of other groups to battle the polygamist lifestyle and help those wanting to escape. It operated independently, another example of how diffuse the overall effort against the FLDS remained.

When I made a call to the commission to see what action might be taken about Judge Steed, who had steadily punished our clients with his own brand of heavy church justice, I learned that Tapestry was already in the process of filing a similar complaint, so we supported them and I gave the commission a briefing on what our clients felt were some of the judge's abuses of power.

With their automatic immunity from prosecution, judges are hard targets, but the stubborn Judge Steed was his own worst enemy. The part-time judge had been on the bench since 1980, hearing cases primarily on Saturdays so as not to interfere with his job as a truck driver. He was just another cog in the FLDS machine. Steed provided a legal shield for kicking young males out of town, or he would team up with the cops and frustrate the young men long enough that they would leave on their own. Some of our clients in the Lost Boys matter told of being picked up by the police on some absurd charge and taken directly before the judge, who sentenced them to perform community service without even being granted a hearing. Some boys literally had thousands of hours of community service stacked against them, for charges such as being out past curfew or “running away,” the court's term for leaving the house without parental permission.

Steed also provided revenue through court fines such as traffic tickets on unsuspecting travelers, and he generally settled disputes however church leaders wanted. He belonged to them.

Judge Steed was an unrepentant polygamist. So the easiest way to expose his unworthiness for the bench was not a stack of examples of bias and misconduct, but the underlining of how he had violated his oath of office. He had sworn to uphold the law, and polygamy was against the law. The judge was married to three women and had thirty-two children.

Warren Jeffs certainly was not going to emerge from hiding to speak on his behalf. Answering his own question about what to do in the Steed case, Warren said, “The Lord showed me through the night that I must answer them nothing. So I answer nothing.” Judge Steed was thrown under the bus. It took more than a year, but in 2006, the Utah Supreme Court finally kicked Walter Steed off the bench, ruling that his personal religious beliefs could not trump the law.

In February 2005, the Lord told Jeffs to take another road trip, this time to the last place I would have suspected. “He will have me witness one of the most immoral parties that this nation allows,” he stated, and with ten thousand dollars in his pocket, he led his little cadre of Naomi and their driver-helpers Isaac Jeffs and Ben Johnson to New Orleans. He had been there the previous year and witnessed the evils of a New Orleans Saints professional football game. This time, there was an even bigger attraction: Mardi Gras.

They arrived in the Big Easy at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, February 6, and Naomi and Warren were dropped off at Bourbon Street to stroll the French Quarter while Isaac and Ben hunted up hotel rooms. Soon, partiers were massing in what the prophet called “one great ugly, dark immorality.” It was everything he had dreamed about.

The parades began, and outrageously costumed and masked women and men aboard carnival floats pulled by little tractors hurled beads and necklaces into the cheering throng. Everyone seemed to be drinking. Girls were having their faces painted. Funny hats were everywhere. Wild music rolled out of bars. It was not yet three o'clock in the afternoon, and the prophet and his team retreated to their hotel rooms about a mile from the action. Isaac and Ben were dispatched back into the party zone on a scouting mission.

While Warren and Naomi rested, the two appalled elders reported by cell phone at five o'clock that things were getting wild. Men were hollering to women to bare their breasts in exchange for strands of beads, and the women were doing it! Ornate balconies around hotels in the Quarter were thick with people flinging down beads and flashing their bodies while motioning for women to take off their clothes, too.

The shocked FLDS men came back to the rooms, so that Warren could join them for a nighttime foray after sending a message back to the faithful to pray for him because he was in “great danger.” He decided that he could not allow Naomi to witness the shocking goings-on, so he gave her a cell phone and ordered her to stay in the hotel room and push the sofa against the door.

Naomi probably would not have been very pleased about being left out of the party. The woman was no fragile flower and was more than capable of taking care of herself. While most of his followers had not seen Warren Jeffs for more than a year, since August 10, 2003, Naomi had been constantly at his side as his most trusted and favored wife, friend, scribe, and lover.

“Howdy, Naomi's gorgeous!” he happily declared to start one entry in his Record. “Nomes” was pretty in her long FLDS dresses with her flowing auburn hair wound up in a plyg-do, and she was even more delightful to Warren in the gentile clothes she wore on the road. One might think that she was really just another of Warren's many wives, a cowed adjunct to his massive ego. That would be a misconception. Anyone who challenged the queen bee would later regret it. Naomi was a player, and she had the prophet's ear.

It seemed that she had been conniving her way to the top forever. As a daughter of Merril Jessop, who was among the FLDS elite, she had been treated gently by others as a child and had quickly grown to understand the benefits of power. When she was only eleven years old, Naomi had created a sensation by kidnapping a girl of about eight or nine that she did not like and taking her down to the overgrown waterway from which the town of Short Creek drew its name, where she tormented her adversary and held her captive for an entire day. The whole town turned out to search for the missing girl, only to discover the perpetrator of the crime was off-limits to discipline. Instead of punishing her or getting her professional mental-health treatment, the community hushed up the event and handled it in-house.

Only six years later, on July 18, 1993, the seventeen-year-old Naomi had the honor of becoming a wife for the aging prophet Rulon Jeffs, who was eighty-three at the time. That catapulted her into an even more prominent role. The teenager matured into a shrewd young woman and became a favored wife of her elderly husband, although rumors swirled about her simultaneous closeness to his son Warren. When Rulon died, Naomi quickly switched her allegiance and became Warren's first new transfer bride. She had no children by either of them, so there was no competition for her attention. Naomi got close to Warren and stayed there, a woman who knew all of the secrets of a religion run strictly by men. She appeared to be as adept at manipulating Warren as she had been in handling the old man, and by letting her transcribe the Priesthood Record, Jeffs gave her immense power. She was always at hand, or at least nearby, and in his description, she heard “the [heavenly] whisperings.”

She was very careful and knew exactly how the game was played. Warren might issue some vague warning, such as, “The Lord is watching you closely, Naomi, beware lest you fall.” That would spell doom for most FLDS members, but Naomi knew how to respond. “I rejoice in you, Sweetheart. I humbly acknowledge the error I am in, in questioning through a lack of reaching.” The problem was solved, the doubt crushed, and Warren's ego stroked.

Her power lay not only in assembling his thoughts and sermons while he was awake, but in doing so even while he slept. Nomes was the eternal sentinel, always there, and Priesthood Record sections frequently opened with the phrase “Naomi's Testimony of What Happened Through the Night.” She would spill forth some of the most dramatic scenes to be found in the thousands of pages of the Record. She would bear witness that Warren would fall unconscious and be surrounded by circles of flame, be thrown about and twisted on the bed, at times actually levitating above the mattress. Mysterious pillars of light would pulse at the bedside while heavenly bodies communed with the incoherent prophet. Naomi would claim that a veil would cover her eyes and Warren would be gone from the room. She would hear soft voices as flames danced and the prophet would be returned to his bed, drained from visiting with heavenly beings.