I couldn’t believe the nerve of the FLDS in blatantly destroying evidence.
“And still Merrill doesn’t bring Sarah or the other girls! Meanwhile, CPS had discovered information in the schoolhouse about a Teresa Steed Jessop who was sixteen and already had a baby. CPS asked for Teresa and six more specific girls they had found from the school journals, but only four of them showed up, and one was pregnant at age sixteen. Plus, several girls we interviewed said there is a Sarah Barlow here on the YFZ, but Merrill never brought her to us.”
Due to the large number of pregnant teen girls and the deliberate destruction of evidence, Sheriff Doran and the Texas Rangers commanders felt that it had become necessary to do a house-to-house search. As they started searching houses that morning, Doran told me, they found more pregnant underage girls who unashamedly lied about their ages, most of them looking to their husbands or fathers to supply the investigators with the years of their fake birthdates.
“I gotta tell you something you’re not going to like. CPS is going to have to remove these young women into foster care—they can’t let them return home to their families. Based on what we’ve found so far, CPS thinks that all children under the age of seventeen are in danger.”
Somberly, I hung up the phone and switched on the news again. Neither the rangers nor CPS said much except that they were pleased with the nonviolent nature of the investigation so far. A few hours later, however, news crews showed large buses arriving on the compound to take the young women and children away. I watched members of my extended family and a few of the older children I knew lining up, and I rejoiced to see some of my former sister-wives with child, and others holding the hands of little ones. Motherhood was what so many of them had longed for when Rulon was alive.
Yet the scenes on the screen pulled at my heart. The images were too eerily reminiscent of the ’53 raid. Memories of the terror I’d experienced as a child hearing those stories coursed throughout my body—and here I was, safe in Idaho!
Elissa, Amelia, and I got on the phone together and searched for our mother and sisters in the sea of familiar faces on CNN. We were disappointed that we were unable to locate any members of our immediate family, until we realized why: the missing person reports!
“They’ll do anything to keep Sherrie and Ally from police and media, won’t they?” I said to my sisters. “Otherwise, they’ll have to admit they’ve not complied with a missing person report for three years!” We cried for all of these women, yet we were genuinely grateful to Texas for following through where Utah and Arizona hadn’t had the guts.
Ben, however, was livid with me.
“Why don’t you let it go?” he asked. “That part of our lives is over.” It wasn’t for me, though. I cared about these people, and my sisters were still missing. Sheriff Doran hadn’t exaggerated about the number of people on the ranch. According to news reports, by the end of the evening, 167 children had been removed and were staying at the civic center near Eldorado, where cribs and cots had been set up for them. How the hell could CPS have prepared for this? I watched the Texas Rangers and local authorities, alert in their full body armor and artillery, as they oversaw the process, and was relieved that I never observed any one of them point a weapon at any of the people.
The next day, the sheriff called me bright and early. He and the rangers had worked through the night once again without a break. There was too much evidence of organized crime to ignore.
Doran reported fifty-two girls ranging from six months to seventeen years were removed from the ranch, many of them visibly pregnant. It was enough for Ranger Brooks Long to visit District Judge Barbara Walther with another affidavit requesting an additional search warrant. (While the first affidavit listed thirty pages of documentation from Sarah’s calls, this one detailed multiple crimes of abuse and bigamy and ran hundreds of pages. The ranger had no way of knowing this would likely become the most highly scrutinized search warrant in U.S. court history.)
CPS workers finally interviewed some of the young girls who had given birth to one or more babies, but they were having great difficulty getting straight answers, even from the ones who seemed most willing to be honest. When workers asked if the girls had had sex, they’d answer no, even if it was clear they’d given birth.
“Why would they answer that way, Becky?” Sheriff Doran asked me, chagrined and exhausted. “Are all these young girls lying, too?”
“Not necessarily,” I said carefully. “Although I’m sure they’ve been coached. The problem is the word sex.”
“Yeah,” he said, perplexed. “That’s what makes the babies, right?”
“No one uses the word sex in that culture—except maybe a few older adults, and only referring to what other people do in the outside world. These girls won’t know what you mean.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Tell the workers to ask them if they have had ‘marital relations’ with their husbands.”
This clarification in language worked, and the social workers were finally making a little more headway. Throughout the day, I continued to receive calls from the sheriff, asking me to explain scenarios, situations, and the significance of particular words that were flummoxing the workers.
Every development became international news, and the media were clamoring for the story, but Brooks Long and his commanding officer, Captain Barry Caver, issued an order of silence to their ranks. They needed their officers engaged in organizing and preserving the evidence they had found rather than informing swarms of reporters. Sheriff Doran, too, refused to speak to anyone except occasionally the Mankins. Lawyers for the FLDS had already begun a campaign of protest and counterpublicity, calling the raid unjust.
Later that day, the sheriff sounded worse. “My God, Becky, we had no idea of how big of an operation this was going to mushroom into! At every turn we encounter major resistance. Get this: each time we enter a house, kids slip out the back doors and windows—going back to houses we’ve already searched! Now they’ve resorted to behaviors and rude comments that we normally wouldn’t put up with on the street. And tell me, what’s the deal with the little kids with notebooks and pens?”
I puzzled over his question for a moment, then exclaimed, “Oh my goodness! Are they asking for your names?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
“They’re keeping track of the damned,” I said. I couldn’t help but grin at the audacity of these cheeky little kids, chronicling the names of the rangers for restriction from Heaven. “You see, Sheriff, you are not only Gentiles, but they see you as persecuting God’s chosen people. Your names will be kept in a book of records of those who will be destroyed in the last days.”
“Well, that’s a little creepy,” he said, not finding the humor in it. “Today, there was this van that kept circling the compound, always as far as possible from our surveillance vehicle. We weren’t sure what we would find in it. Men with an arsenal? Bombs? Cameras? When we finally pulled it over, guess what it was filled with?”
“What?” I asked, worried.
“Pregnant teenage girls! Several of them! Sadly, none of them admitted to being Sarah Barlow.”
I was still uncomfortable. What if the rangers had been convinced the people in the van were a threat? Thank God the officers were more careful and compassionate than I had given them credit for.
“Becky?” the sheriff asked suddenly. “Do you think you could come down here? I’m in over my head. We all are. I think what we’ve got here is the biggest child custody case in the history of this nation. We’ve gotta have someone who understands these people.”
I quickly agreed. We discussed possible scenarios for my arrival, and I prepared to get off the phone to make my travel arrangements. Suddenly the sheriff interrupted me.
“I have to tell you something important first. We’re going to have to go into their temple.”
“What?”
“We don’t know what or who they have in t
here, and they’re refusing to open the doors voluntarily! We know it’s sacred to them. The last thing we want to do is barge in. But their refusal could mean any number of things, none of which sound good to us.”
I was silent. How long had the people dreamed of a temple? As with the early saints, it was a symbol of their devotion to their God.
“They keep tying our hands, Becky,” he said sadly. “They keep tying our hands.”
Later that night, a friend still closely tied with Short Creek called me to tell me that an armored ambulance had been sent out to the ranch just as the officers were preparing to go into the temple. The ambulance had the ominous appearance of a tank, and I knew officers would send it only if it seemed necessary.
I was frightened of how the FLDS would react to law enforcement breaching their temple, and I felt completely helpless. I tried calling the sheriff back a couple of times that evening to see if anyone was hurt. He didn’t answer. In desperation, I finally called Uncle Merrill shortly before 9:30 p.m., pleading with him to cooperate and be honest with law enforcement. He talked to me for a few minutes about his views on the raid, and I was relieved he didn’t say that Warren wanted the men to defend the temple with their lives. Perhaps there was hope for a bloodless raid after all.
CHAPTER 25
Apostate at the Temple Gates
In the middle of my packing for my flight to Texas, Ben had nearly forbidden me from going.
“What’s the deal, Beck?” he said. “Have to go off and save the world again? Testifying hasn’t given you enough attention?” Swearing he wouldn’t give me one red cent to get to Texas, Ben made it clear I might not have a home to come back to. I thought long and hard. These were our sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews, their lives and families at stake. And as Mother Becky and Grandmother Becky, I’d been sister-wife, mother, and grandmother to many of them. I was being offered the chance to help them. I had to take it.
Descending the stairs onto the tarmac in San Angelo, I looked up at the night sky. I had never seen so many stars. Sheriff Doran and another officer had come to pick me up, along with Elissa, who had arrived the day before. She’d found out I was going and asked if she could help, too.
In the car, Doran caught me and Elissa up to speed: sixty FLDS mothers had voluntarily left the ranch to be with their children, and none of the men were allowed to leave the ranch during the investigation. So Saturday afternoon had been tense as the rangers, sheriffs, and their team, armed with a battering ram, prepared to breach the huge oak doors of the temple.
As he was explaining this, we neared Eldorado and were just north of town. The sheriff zoomed close to the perimeter of the YFZ ranch. There was no mistaking the FLDS temple, lit up with huge spotlights. My heart was pounding as I took in the monolithic white building I’d seen only in photos.
The sheriff said softly, “You know, after those initial interviews in the schoolhouse, Merrill suddenly disappeared. He was still on the ranch, but other than a couple of brief phone conversations, he hadn’t been in contact. So on Saturday, we had yet to find Sarah, or this ‘Dale Barlow’ that Sarah mentions as the husband who has been beating her. Then Flora calls me and says her sister got a call from this Sarah and she says she’s being forced to stay in a cold, dark place. That could be anywhere, but we’re concerned it might be the temple basement.”
The sheriff pulled up next to the gate and showed his badge to the officers guarding the perimeter. We parked just off the road, and the sheriff continued.
“So when I was told that it was time to go into the temple, Captain Caver asked if I wanted to be part of it, and I said yes, being that this whole thing is taking place in my community. I was also hoping we’d find Sarah, once and for all.
“We geared up, in helmets and heavy-armored vests, but I didn’t have any type of weapon as I was helping with the battering ram. As we approached the gates, the FLDS cut off all communication with us. In fact, they totally quit cooperating, which was not a good sign. We’d heard that Willie Jessop was saying the men should defend that temple with their very lives.”
I shuddered.
“The FLDS attorneys told us their men wanted to do a silent protest about us entering their temple, and they stationed their men all the way around the temple walls, praying. When we breached the gate, the FLDS men stationed around the temple cried out. I’ve never heard anything like it. They were absolutely bawling with grief.”
“You weren’t struck by lightning like they thought you would be,” Elissa said.
“Exactly,” he continued. “They cried out that they were not faithful enough, not holy enough. It broke my heart. Anyway, we stepped onto the temple grounds and approached the stairwell. The higher we went, the more men we could see standing on top of vehicles and houses and gathering in small crowds to watch us. We knew that anything could happen, and had officers stationed to make sure nothing would. We had to walk up a helluva lot of steps in the back with the battering ram, while having to watch for attack or bombs from inside. Suddenly at the back steps, the locksmith had this panic attack and had to be given oxygen. Then it was time for us to use the battering ram.”
He paused for a moment, looking up at the temple again.
“We rammed in that beautiful heavy oak door, and every time the ram hit, you could hear the reverberations half a mile away. It was so big and heavy, we had to swap guys out. We make it through those doors, and there was another heavy set behind it. We got through that, too.”
He shook his head, and looked over at me. “If they had walked in with us, we could have been in and out of there in an hour or less, but every single door was locked. That looks very suspicious, and so of course, we have to force every door open, even every cabinet door. One SWAT officer cracked his wrist on one of the heavy oak suckers and had to receive medical attention. It took us three, maybe four hours to search that temple. So the team was doing what they have to do, clearing rooms. As we secured one floor, we’d be off to the next.
“All I got to say is that we felt like shit going into that special, sacred place of theirs. Most of our men are Christian or believers. We felt sick about it…” He paused and looked me in the eyes.
“… that is, until we reached the third floor.”
My heart shuddered. The weekend had been particularly rough on every FLDS member: April 6, which would have been a day of historical remembrance and celebration, had seen families torn apart and their temple desecrated. In addition, their closely held secrets were quickly unraveling. Instinctively I knew I would be seeing some of those secrets in the temple the next day.
The following morning, my sister and I awoke in our hotel knowing that both the FLDS and the state of Texas were under enormous pressure. We hoped we could make a difference. The sheriff requested that Elissa and Shannon Price, a spokeswoman for Uncle Dan Fischer’s Diversity Foundation, help out at CPS. That weekend, the women and children had been bused again, this time to San Angelo, fifty miles from Eldorado. They were placed in temporary housing at historic Fort Concho, under much more controlled yet somewhat primitive circumstances. By Sunday CPS realized that on a ranch supposedly supporting a total of two hundred people, well over four hundred children had been discovered!
CPS had another dilemma. Under Texas law, once a child is removed from his or her home, the child must be returned home within two weeks unless investigators can prove abuse. If a case involves one or two children—even one or two families—that two-week window isn’t usually a problem, but they had cleared out children from an entire small city, so things would become exponentially more difficult.
Carmen Dusek, a brilliant estate lawyer whom I would later meet, was also known as a passionate family-law case volunteer. The previous Friday, Judge Walther had asked her to find family law professionals to serve as guardians ad litem to represent the twenty-five children in court. By that Friday evening, the number of children had risen to 108. On Sunday, Carmen and fellow attorney Randol Stout were told t
hat as many as 463 children needed representation for what was undeniably the largest CPS case in Texas history. That weekend, Carmen pulled out all the stops, calling upon family members, friends, professional associates, church communities, and even strangers. Some of these volunteers were estate or contract lawyers; some had never taken a family-law class. It would take a miracle to provide representation.
“How in the world can we pull this off?” Carmen later told me she murmured on her way to the church that had donated the space to gather volunteers. “Dear God, please help us protect those children and their rights.” When she pushed open the door, she witnessed the great hall overflowing with volunteer law professionals ready to represent FLDS children.
I was struck by the vast numbers of Texan volunteers coming out of the woodwork, not just attorneys. Meals were brought in from families, businesses, and churches across the state. Bedding and clothing were donated by the truckloads. Medical personnel had arrived to care for all of the women and children. I felt like I had after the fire in my childhood home, when people’s caring attitudes changed my views forever. I hoped it might do the same for the women and children now in San Angelo.
Doran asked me to work the law enforcement command post on the ranch that day, and reminded me that for my safety, and to preserve the integrity of the investigation, I would have to be escorted by a sheriff or ranger wherever I went. On our way over, Doran added that they were still looking for children in hiding, and he was visibly discouraged by the fact that they still hadn’t located Sarah. The antics of the FLDS people as workers attempted to catalog families were also getting to him.
“We’re trying to keep them together… Why do they tell us so-and-so is this child’s mother, but she runs to another woman when she’s afraid? Or they identify the mother of an infant and a toddler, but she’s stooped and gray to her toes!”
The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice Page 29