The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice

by Musser, Rebecca

  There was an awkward silence for a moment; then Brooks murmured to the sheriff, “If Rulon was interested at ninety, then damn well Warren and these guys are doing what we thought they were.” He turned to me, much softer than he had been before. “And that desk?” he asked, pointing to the smaller one.

  “Well, the clerk’s desk next to the bed is where the Church Recorder—the designated Priesthood leader ordained to this job—makes a record of the training. According to FLDS teachings, a record of every ordinance must be not only witnessed but recorded and kept safe.” Sure enough, to the right of the clerk’s desk, there was an open white cabinet that held an electronic safe, with a shredding machine below it. Just as Warren had guaranteed that the information on the Fullness of the Celestial Law didn’t leave his father’s home, Warren and his minions had not taken any chances about leaking it to the outside world.

  On our way out I looked back at the bed. I hadn’t seen a Murphy bed since Rulon’s last days, when my sister-wife Mary had nursed him around the clock. This bed looked like it was made by the same hands, and I had a very good idea of which craftsman had built it. Did that man have a clue as to what it was for? Did he know who would be victimized by the work of his hands?

  Attached to that room was a doorway through which we entered a gigantic assembly room, as blinding white as the third level: white carpet, white paint, white benches, white chairs. Cleverly positioned skylights created the impression of a bedazzling pillar of light, similar to the one in our stories about Joseph Smith receiving his first visitation from the Lord. Across the expanse, three large, round white tables were set up with chairs, and the room was lined with shelves of scriptures, with pure white reclining chairs nearby.

  “Now, what do you think of this?” asked the ranger.

  It took everything I had not to burst out into sobs.

  In the center of the room several chairs had been placed in a semicircle for the witnesses of the ordinance, including the tall-backed chairs to honor the First Presidency. There was a small desk in the corner, again for the clerk or recorder. But it chilled me to see the several chairs in the middle, near something that had obviously been so heavy it had left grooves in the carpet when it was removed. The marks had alerted the team, who’d found it in a storage closet in the hallway and set it up again on the side of the room. Brooks pointed to it, and my eyes darted from the obvious mattress to the retractable rails.

  Here it was, in all white with gold hinges: the sacramental, full-sized “Heavenly” bed just large enough for two. There was no mistaking that the white, padded bench on the end was a place for observers to kneel.

  Before we descended again, Brooks turned to me. “Until you told the sheriff on the phone about the beds and what they signified, all we could do was speculate—but additional evidence has begun to show up. When Caver secured this floor and called on the radio, ‘Get your ass up here,’ I took one look and cordoned off the crime scene. But I’ll be honest—I let all my guys come up here to see. We’d all felt like shit coming in their sacred place, but I wanted them to see that much more than prayers was going on inside. You are validating exactly what we worried about.

  “There are other parts of the temple I need to show you,” he continued. “But first, can you tell me what Blood Atonement is?”

  I froze.

  Up until my final year in Rulon Jeffs’s home, I had never heard of an ordinance involving Blood Atonement, except in reference to Jesus Christ making the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. One day, however, I had come upon my sister-wife Tammy in the hallway of the Prophet’s home. She was deathly pale and holding a book open with the palm of her hand.

  “Have you read this?” she asked me. I glanced at the cover of the book that Warren had suggested we all study: Purity and the Celestial Law of Marriage.

  “Only the first few pages,” I told her truthfully. “Why?”

  “It talks about Blood Atonement…”

  My body had gone cold. All I could picture was the painting of Abraham as depicted in the Old Testament, knife in hand, towering above his son, Isaac, whom he had tethered to an altar as he prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice—to kill his son for God.

  Tammy showed me a passage from the book written by our Prophet John Taylor. “Is this the only way for such a sinful person to have all their sins absolved before God?” she asked. I was dumbfounded and unable to answer. Just then, a door opened into the foyer, and we saw Warren’s unmistakable silhouette. Tammy looked over at me, and I nodded. We figured we might as well get our answers, so we approached him and Tammy handed the book to him, open to the page she had been reading. He glanced at it for three seconds.

  “Oh yeah,” he said nonchalantly, and handed it back. “This was established in the early part of the church, for adulterers, fornicators, and murderers—anyone who requires a greater sacrifice to reach the highest kingdom. To sincerely repent is not enough to show God their true repentance. This ultimate sacrifice will take thousands of years off of your suffering in the afterlife.” My heart had raced. Warren had already threatened that I would be destroyed in the flesh for not being a “comfort” to my husband. Would this be required of me?

  Warren went on to explain that the ordinance would take place in the basement of the temple. “An executioner is ordained to hold this office as an angel of destruction,” he said somberly. “Dressed in robes, he must say specific prayers, and when it is time, he must cut the person’s throat in this specific way.” As I watched him gesture, I could almost feel the cold steel of a blade across my neck.

  “It is something we will do again,” Warren said, then looked at me, repeating the words he had said in his office: “The Prophet holds the key to your salvation.” Then he had walked away, leaving me chilled to my core.

  I now shared this story with the sheriff and Brooks and told them why it had haunted me. Rumors had spread throughout Short Creek about Blood Atonement. Everyone who had left was disturbed by the number of men, women, and children who’d just poofed into thin air. Obviously most had made their way here onto the YFZ, but some were still unaccounted for. They might have been holed up in houses of hiding across the country, still awaiting the commands Warren still issued from prison. But I knew that other Mormon extremists had used Blood Atonement to excuse the ritual killings of family members, like Ervil LeBaron of the LeBaron family, who had continued to issue death sentences from behind prison walls. I had never been inclined to blow things out of proportion, but I hadn’t thought Warren capable of what I’d already seen in the temple. It worried me that no one could predict what he would do.

  I was incredibly relieved to find there was no sign of a place for the Blood Atonement ritual when we canvassed the rest of the temple, including the baptismal font. Although several rooms downstairs were eerily empty, whatever Warren had planned for the future, seeing the beds had been enough for me for one day.

  When we left I breathed in drafts of warm, spring Texas air. I would be fine with never going indoors ever again.

  Late that day Doran informed me that the court released affidavits from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) detailing information about Sarah Barlow’s blocked calls, and it continued the international media frenzy. She had a pattern of getting paranoid, hanging up, and calling back. She’d cry, “They’re coming! They may be listening… They lock up the phones… I may not have a phone… There’s a guard in the guard tower here on the ranch.”

  It sounded all too plausible, especially as she used FLDS verbiage, but suddenly the calls had stopped.

  As the officers continued to search the compound for her, Brooks, Caver, and Doran seemed worried. What if they really did have her hidden away in either the temple vault or the temple annex vault? There was only one way to find out.

  CHAPTER 27

  Breaching the Vault

  My attempt to locate Sarah by reviewing some boxes of evidence and files that were confusing to the officers proved fruitless as well. That W
ednesday, I was stationed at the temple annex building with Joe Haralson, an older ranger who had heard so many FLDS lies that he initially had very little faith in me. Ranger Haralson’s wariness seemed to be justified by some disturbing news he delivered to me. My sister-in-law Miranda, who was married to Ben’s brother Oliver, asked her midwife to call the authorities in Texas and provide false information: she said I was an informant with a huge chip on my shoulder, that I was bitter and hateful, and would do anything to bring down the FLDS. Her midwife swore that I had made a prank call as Sarah to spur the raid. Fortunately, I was able to set the record straight with Texas authorities, starting with Joe, and the sheriff, who had heard the recorded calls and backed me up, saying it could not have been me.

  Several of the rangers got angry and prepared to go after Miranda for supplying false information. I asked them not to, but I did send her an e-mail warning her about the criminality of falsifying reports and possible prosecution. But she was only one of a slew calling with worries and fears and speculations. FLDS members in other parts of the nation and Canada were terrified as rumors abounded. My dad called to tell me that Irene’s daughter Cindy had been on the YFZ, and she had told Irene that women and children were being held in concentration camps and had been made to line up and strip down in front of men who were checking them by hand for pregnancy.

  I angrily refuted this rumor.

  “First of all, Dad, they have made sure that women work with the women officers as much as possible. Some urine tests have been conducted, but these women have been treated with more respect than they have by their own husbands. As far as the people, if they had just told the truth, none of this would have ever happened! No one would have been removed—no one would have entered the temple. If anyone is to blame it is Uncle Merrill and his lies, yet still people are continuing to spread fabrications.”

  I filled him in on all of the FLDS misdeeds, including LeRoy Steed’s flight from officers with a hard drive, and the van filled with pregnant teens. “Consider your sources, Dad. The women are not being put up in the Hilton, but they have everything except showers, and that’s being fixed as we speak. They’re being well fed and treated with respect. The FLDS are spreading bullshit.”

  The calls and speculations seemed to slow considerably when DPS revealed the discovery of beds inside the FLDS temple and suggested that it was an area where men “engage[d] in sexual activity with female children under the age of seventeen.” Doran had warned me they had found even more evidence regarding the ages of some of the girls having to be “trained,” most of them Warren’s younger wives. It made me physically ill, but I pushed it out of my brain and focused on finding Sarah. The longer she was missing, the more we worried for her safety.

  I was looking over a list of properties rangers had found, and then the bus lists, and realized that though several of the women had changed their names, there were often enough clues so that I could guess who they were.

  Suddenly I gasped.

  “What is it?” asked the ranger.

  My heart lurched as I recognized the names of my sister Savannah’s children, along with two more I hadn’t even known about. Savannah had made up different first and last names for herself, but wisely used her children’s real first names. To her, I was likely Satan incarnate, but seeing her name made me realize just how much I had missed her. I’d been strong this whole time, but this was too much, and for the first time I cried in front of the officers.

  Quickly I gathered myself again, as we were on a serious deadline. Time was rapidly running on out on the search warrants—law enforcement had only a week from issue to be on the ranch. Locksmiths from San Antonio had been brought in to crack the safes in the temple and the annex building I was in. The priority was the temple annex vault, where we speculated the records still were since the temple was not yet dedicated. Brooks also brought in a jackhammer crew and started creating a hole in the eighteen-inch-thick cement. They were making more progress than the locksmiths. Both vaults had air vents built in, so there was wariness in opening either vault as to what, or who, might be inside. Brooks warned both crews that they were taking their lives into their hands, as explosives could have been set to go off in the safes. When they got close to breach, he had me escorted out for safety. I was later informed when a large enough hole had been cut with the jackhammer, and Ranger Jesse Valdez, the slightest of all the men, crawled through carefully, armed only with a flashlight. Brooks let me reenter the area in time to see Valdez emerge from the vault covered from head to toe in thick white dust.

  “I found them!” he said, smiling. He’d discovered forty-four boxes of records and several additional safes inside.

  Law enforcement felt other repercussions, as the FLDS had launched a full-fledged propaganda campaign, using the hungry media to spin their story. In a Deseret News interview, three mothers reported they were being denied access to their children and housed in the most primitive of circumstances. On CNN, Merrill’s wife Kathleen sobbed, “I want you to understand that we’ve been put in a compound, Fort Concho, over there, with brick walls. One hundred feet by forty feet… one hundred and seventy women and children, two bathrooms… We are being treated like the Jews were when they were escorted to the German Nazi camps.”

  Law enforcement reminded the FLDS members and the media that the adult women had come voluntarily and were free to leave anytime, but the media was coming down hard on Brooks, who didn’t have time to call an official press conference to refute the lies.

  I met him out on the lawn by the temple annex building, where he was pacing back and forth, furious.

  “I do not have time for this shit! You know, Becky, when they first came here, we welcomed them. All they had to do was leave the young girls alone. When we showed up, they lied. And now they’re lying again! How dumb do they think we are?”

  In the meantime, he’d heard from Flora that she’d received more calls from Sarah.

  “Something’s not right here,” Brooks told me. “I smell a rat.”

  I continued my work in the temple annex, trying to locate Sarah, validate records, and answer questions. For lunch, I’d been relying on the cook shed or chuck wagon that a local businessman had donated to feed an enormous number of the rangers and the residents. Most of the FLDS men ate in their own homes, but some of the young men and very old emerged periodically, so we had to be watchful, and I was always accompanied.

  As I approached the chuck wagon that day, Ranger Jason Kinerd motioned to me to quietly follow him across the way.

  “What can you tell me about this kid?” he asked me, pointing at Warren’s son Tobias, who looked terrified as he sat on the ground, rocking himself. I told him about Toby, who was autistic and obviously wanted to be with his mother. Since he was over eighteen, he wasn’t allowed to leave the ranch.

  What I saw next touched my heart. Several gruff-looking rangers sat down next to him, comforted him, and offered him lunch from the wagon. I overheard them reassure him that he was not in any danger, and they went to great lengths to make sure he knew that his mother was not, either. Toby loosened up and ate three desserts—probably a big treat, as most FLDS were raised to eschew sugary foods.

  After lunch, as I made my way back to the temple annex building with Joe by my side, Jason approached me again.

  “Yeah, I got the dirt on you!” he cried. “You were listening to devil music!”

  “What?”

  “I read a confession letter from your friend Samantha.”

  I looked at the ranger, and back at Joe (who had finally started to trust me), and started giggling. I knew what Jason must have found in the records!

  When I was a student at Alta Academy, Warren taught us that devil music began in the ’60s when the Beatles sold their souls to the devil—a black man who gave them a record contract.

  “If you take delight in this type of music,” he said, “you are going down an immoral path, and taking on that black man’s devil-worshipping spirit.
” I tried hard to be good, listening to church hymns and classical music. But the world was so melodious, and I was often drawn to other forms, like ragtime. (I could only imagine what Warren would say about that!)

  “One night,” I told the ranger, “Samantha called. ‘Come and get me right now!’ Right after family class, I told Nephi I had a quick errand, and I took one of the property’s vehicles to pick Samantha up. She popped in some music and we drove around the back roads, turning it up really loud, screaming our guts out!”

  “What was it?” the ranger asked. He was expecting some heavy-metal band.

  “It was a group called A-Teens, singing their rendition of ABBA’s ‘Super Trouper.’ ”

  “Hunh?”

  “That was it, I swear! It was baaaad, because it had drumbeats and worldly lyrics—I think there’s even a reference to a kiss.”

  “Dear God, no!”

  “Oh yeah, I’m sure that was why Samantha says I crossed into dark, dark waters.” We had a good laugh before we got right back to work.

  Back in the annex, I realized soberly that most of the letters of repentance officials had found in Warren’s Escalade and in boxes of records revealed secrets much more serious than Samantha’s ABBA confession. Warren had once again found a way to blackmail his greatest supporters: forcing them to give up their darkest skeletons in exchange for their salvation.

  CHAPTER 28

  Sex, Lies, and Videotape

  Brooks had warned me that first day that I might have to testify about what I was seeing on the ranch. Although I had turned down every request since Warren’s criminal trial in Utah, as I promised Lamont and Roger I would, what I was observing in Texas made me realize that someone had to speak for the voiceless. Brooks recognized he had some solid criminal cases. At the same time, though, CPS was fighting a losing battle in a no-win fourteen-day hearing schedule.