Prophet's Prey (3 page)

“We need your help to stop Warren Jeffs from destroying families, kicking us out of our homes, and marrying our children into some kind of political brownie-point system.” It had been that open plea that had piqued my interest. Was the prophet truly running a whole town in modern-day America by using these despotic techniques? It seemed impossible to me.

During the three hours that I listened to Ross and Lori, I stayed in professional mode and carefully sifted through their words. Were they lying? Were they vague or inconsistent on important details? Were they just after money or media attention? Did the timeline hang together? Was there any proof? They had lent me their love letters to the girl, allowed me to copy the entire hard drive of their computer, and answered all of my questions without hesitation. Those were not the actions of people trying to hide information. I started to believe them.

I finally had to halt their astonishing narrative to explain a sticking point, one they seemed not to fully comprehend: In addition to polygamy being illegal, the girl they wanted to marry was only sixteen! That would be illegal on its own, regardless of any equally illegal polygamous relationship, and Ross could have been prosecuted not only for bigamy, but for child abuse as well.

It was strange having to explain to a couple of adults that there was a huge, sprawling nation beyond the boundaries of Short Creek and that, like it or not, they were part of the state of Arizona and the United States of America and subject to the laws of the land. Living in their little theocracy had blinded them to the values and laws of our society.

“So you understand that the legal age for marriage is eighteen,” I finally said, raising my eyebrows to elicit a promise. “Right, Ross?”

Ross said nothing. Lori remained silent.

“Eighteen! Right, Ross?” Stronger this time. It was a deal-breaker for me. There was a soft groan of acceptance as he mentally discarded an important card from his life. “Uh, okay. Right. Eighteen.”

It was time for me to make a decision. I had found no inconsistencies in their story, but to work on their situation as a private investigator, I had to be paid for my services in order to invoke the protection of client confidentiality, the same as with a doctor or a lawyer.

“I think I can help you, Ross. But first you have to officially hire me.”

“I don't have any money,” he said.

“Just give me a dollar,” I said. “That's enough.”

“Ok, but, uh—I don't have a dollar.”

I pulled out my wallet, removed a one-dollar bill, and slid it across that laminate table. Ross put his finger on it and slid it back. Transaction complete. I was on the job.

CHAPTER 3

“Uncle Warren?”

That initial meeting with Ross and Lori Chatwin left me trying to sort out a host of questions, with only a minimum of information. I had the nagging feeling, common among private detectives, that the case needed to be made stronger. After a lot of consideration, I made myself a promise: If I found one single thing screwy with Ross's story, I was gone.

One thing that bothered me was that I had known some FLDS people for years, and they in no way resembled those who were perpetrating this outrage against the Chatwins down in Short Creek. I could not imagine them wanting to rip a family apart and throw them out of their home in the middle of winter.

In my construction days, out there building houses on scalding hot concrete pads, I had become friends with a number of FLDS men. Although, at times, their social skills left room for improvement, they excelled in construction. Most were hard-working, decent guys. They were polite and wore clean jeans, with their women in modest prairie dresses and the small kids scrubbed squeaky clean. They kept to themselves, worked hard, did not bother others, and lived far away. Under those tame circumstances, their practice of polygamy was generally viewed as a minor annoyance; I assumed that grown women were making a conscious decision to marry a man who had other adult wives, all living according to the precepts of their shared faith. Weird, but not really a big deal. Some religions play with rattlesnakes. The FLDS had been around the area for so long that they were accepted as just another part of the scenery. Those people—my friends—didn't seem to be a bunch of religious lunatics.

Still, facts were facts. The FLDS church leaders indeed were heartlessly trying to dump the Chatwins out into the cold. My personal scale of justice had tipped in favor of Ross and Lori because of the evidence and their frankness, but perhaps that was just because the other dish on the scale was empty. After years in the area, I realized I didn't know much at all about this religion and its practices. I wanted to know more.
Who was Warren Jeffs, what was the FLDS, and why were they doing this?

Figuring out who was who in that zoo would have to wait; I had the more immediate concern of trying to keep the Chatwins in their home down in Short Creek. I put Ross in touch with the Mohave County Attorney's Office in Arizona, which steered him to a legal clinic in Kingman that provides assistance to those who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer. The hardship eviction case was then assigned by the Arizona Community Legal Services to a lawyer named Joan Dudley. I couldn't have planned it better if I had tried.

Joan embodied many things that the FLDS despised about the outside world. It was well known that in FLDS schools, teachers trimmed pictures of people of color out of the textbooks. Joan was African American. In the FLDS, women are always subservient. Joan was in-your-face aggressive. Women were not to be highly educated. Joan was smart as a whip. I knew she was unafraid of any legal nonsense by the United Effort Plan attorneys or the FLDS and would not back down an inch in the coming fight. She actually seemed to be looking forward to it.

While she took charge of the legal side, I went back to Short Creek because Ross was telling me that he and Lori were afraid to set foot outside their house. Apparently, the church was just waiting to pounce and move his brother, Steven, into the unfinished upstairs portion. In my world, that made no sense. Although the church's UEP Trust had issued an eviction order, the unsettled civil case was in dispute and headed for court. Joan Dudley, active as an officer of the court, wrote a “to-whom-it-may-concern” letter that spelled out that the property was in dispute and no action could take place involving the Chatwins' home until the matter was ruled on by a judge.

Steven had no claim whatsoever on the property, which made the threat to move him into the house seem absurd; still, Ross had grown up in Short Creek and knew the way things worked there. I was willing to take his word for it, and in part to help them feel a little safer, I went back down with construction tools to help him finish off the basement living quarters, install new locks, cut an access to the upstairs area, and build a stairway that would finally connect the two parts and make the place a single, livable house.

I began to understand why the Chatwins were scared. No longer was the mean, sharp edge of the FLDS hidden to me. I had lived for years right up the road, only an hour away, and was in the law enforcement business not only as a private investigator, but as a bail bondsman and bounty hunter. But like most residents of Utah and Arizona, I had paid little attention to goings-on in obscure little Short Creek. The FLDS and its members might as well have been a community of invisible ghosts. Now the town was turning ugly right before my eyes.

As I had started paying attention to them, they had also figured out who I was. When I rolled into town this time, a convoy of overgrown pickup trucks with menacing, dark-tinted windows roared into my rear-view mirror. Then they were right on my tail, gnawing at my bumper, apparently trying to force me off the road. They cut around, boxed me in, slowed down, then sped up and sprayed gravel from their big tires. The tiny rocks peppered my car like bits of shrapnel. It was like being the main character in a
Twilight Zone
episode, the unaware stranger who has just driven off the map into a strange parallel dimension known as “Short Creek.”

Being alone in a situation that had turned unexpectedly threatening did not really bother me. I had encountered much riskier moments as a bounty hunter. The drivers of these trucks were just bullies. I kept going and eventually, they peeled away. Still, I was annoyed enough to tell the Chatwins what had happened, and they explained that it was not really all that unusual; this was a standard greeting committee of souped-up trucks called “plyg-rigs.” The dark-tinted windows made it impossible to identify the occupants, which helped strangers clearly understand they were unwanted by scaring the heck out of them.

There is nothing like personal experience to help an investigator form a conclusion, and the scales tipped farther. There was no way to ignore this latest episode, because it had not happened to someone else; I had been the target. There was nothing subtle about it at all. I had to start thinking about the FLDS in an entirely different light.

The empire struck back a few weeks later. I was still in bed early on a Saturday morning when Ross called to let me know that church-assigned work crews were gathering outside his house. They intended to move his brother Steven and Steven's family into the upstairs portion of the home. Steven was blindly loyal to the church and was assigned the task of harassing Ross into wanting to move. I grabbed a copy of Joan's letter and made it to Ross and Lori's place by 7:30 A.M.

The scene looked like a convention of contractors. About fifty men were already on site, readying their tools and unloading building material from their pickup trucks. I parked and got out, determined to get them to back off. The problem was that these Short Creek workers were unfamiliar with concepts like due process of law, constitutional rights, liberty, independence, and being master of your own fate. These men simply did whatever the prophet commanded them to do—end of story. Consequently, the letter that I showed them, which would have been taken very seriously at any other job site in America, only served to puzzle these people. They paused to await further orders from church leaders.

In Utah, even in Short Creek, people are generally polite, and the confused workers were in a quandary; they had been taught unwavering obedience from the cradle, and to live their religion. They also knew that not following their leaders' orders held dire consequences. Any of them could become the next Ross Chatwin if they did not follow their instructions exactly. I had presented them with an unexpected legal gauntlet that went directly against the word of the prophet. Their response was to call for help: the town marshals.

Up drove Sam Roundy Jr., the town's chief marshall, a six-footer who weighs in at over three hundred pounds and wears a badge and gun, but dresses just like any other FLDS member. His shirt stretched tight across his belly. He and a couple of deputies took charge. Now it was my turn to be puzzled.

I immediately asked Roundy why he was there in the first place. This was a civil dispute in which he had no authority other than to keep the peace and possibly arrest anyone who might try to break into the Chatwin home. Under state law, the police do not have the authority to become involved in civil disputes between private parties. To intervene would quite possibly violate the Chatwins' constitutional rights, which meant the cops would be the ones breaking the law.

On the other hand, I was glad to see them arrive because at least they were sworn law enforcement officers. They could interpret the legalities for the workmen and settle the situation.

I made some introductory private investigator–to–police officer small talk to put them at ease, then handed Roundy the letter from Dudley. Roundy was trapped. He didn't even pretend to be a real cop. The marshal pulled out his cell phone, hit the speed dial, and his first words were, “Uncle Warren?” He turned away from me and read the letter aloud over the phone.

When he hung up, he deliberately threw the document to the ground. “This doesn't mean anything to me,” he snapped, and turned to the men standing around. “You men get to work. Go on in,” he told them.

When Roundy ordered a deputy to break off the locks on the door, Ross handed over a key. The front door opened, and about fifty workmen jammed inside. It was a disturbing and unreal sight. In that other world, where the rest of America lives, police cannot just show up and send people into one's home without a warrant and have them literally tear the house apart. This was breaking and entering, vandalism, trespassing, and about a half dozen more criminal offenses, but worst of all, it was a violation of what most Americans consider to be their absolute constitutional right to be secure in their persons, places, and things. It was a grotesque intrusion by a government agency into a U.S. citizen's home under the color of law—the first of many illegal actions by the Colorado City town marshals' office that I would witness in the years to come.

While I was protesting to Roundy, one of his brothers, who was also a deputy, told Ross to get into the police car. “Hey, he's arresting me!” Ross called out.

That quickly got my attention. I was outraged, and barked, “Why are you arresting him? What has he done? You can talk to him, but you can't detain him. It's his home and property!” Unable to cite any charges, they backed down and let him go. The officers had been ready to snatch a private citizen into custody simply because they wanted to. The entire morning had become a legal circus.

From inside the house came the pounding of hammers and the whine of power saws. The carpenters were already busy. I pulled my video camera out and began recording the crime in progress.

Racking my brain about how to stop the madness, I pointed out the absence of building permits. The contractors claimed that they were working off the original permit, which I knew was five years old and would have long expired. Another call was made, and within minutes, the building inspector, David Darger, was on the scene.

He arrived with a fresh extension for the expired permit and a set of plans for the original house, claiming that the workers were just there to finish the job and bring it up to code. It seemed clear to me that no matter what legal obstacle I could come up with, they would simply take whatever steps were necessary to accomplish their orders. The inspector remained on site throughout the day and night, handing out any needed approvals and doing so-called inspections as the work rolled along, as well as chipping in to finish the job. He reclassified the structure as a duplex so the two halves could not be joined. The staircase that I had helped Ross build was condemned and the inspector actually helped seal it up.

By two o'clock the next morning, their work was done. The crew had covered the new stairway with joists, laid out new flooring, installed plumbing, spread carpet and linoleum, dry walled and painted, and put in counters and countertops. Steven Chatwin and his family moved in.

I could only shake my head in disbelief. There was nothing left to do. The FLDS and its United Effort Plan had ignored basic civil rights and built an apartment right before my eyes as the cops stood by to enforce the will of the church, while ignoring the laws of the land. It would have been fruitless to call for help from another police agency. The nearest real cops were in the county seat of Kingman, Arizona, five hours away, and a request to try to get them to sort this out would probably have been shrugged off with some comment like, “It's Short Creek. What do you expect?”

I was coming to understand that every official in town might be willing to blindly follow church leaders and that ignoring the truth was a normal practice of the FLDS hierarchy. It had been done that way for many decades in their parallel universe. I was furious, but I was also hungry, and I suggested to Ross that we go get some breakfast.

“Okay. We can go down to Hurricane.”

“Why?” I asked. Hurricane was twenty-one miles down the road.

“No restaurants here are going to serve you, because you're a gentile, and they are definitely not going to serve me.” To Ross, that made sense, but in this country, restaurants don't get to choose their customers.

That made up my mind. I drove with Ross over to the Vermillion Cliffs Café, went inside, and could almost feel a shock of surprise ripple through the place. Ross grew pale. I checked off our orders on a pad at the front counter, paid, and sat down, silently daring anyone to try and kick us out. It took a long time to cook those eggs, but the meal was eventually, although reluctantly, served.

It was a small victory at the end of a very long day. Waiting for the meal had only managed to further harden a decision that I had reached earlier while the saws had whined and the hammers had banged and the marshals had broken the law and the building inspector had lied: I was going to treat Short Creek like any other town in America.