Prophet's Prey

by Sam Brower

  In addition to performing hundreds of marriages, Rulon started reshuffling FLDS families. He would take wives from men whom he deemed unworthy and place them instead with men he decided had the ability to lead new concubines to the celestial kingdom. He performed this pimping and pandering for his favorites without fear or hesitation. He did not ask the people involved what they thought. Even Warren was amazed. “We had never seen anything like it,” he said.

  A shift in the center of power was taking place within the FLDS. Although people not born into the faith were never welcome, the church had grown substantially over the years through the multiple wives who kept producing children. In Salt Lake City, when the flock became too numerous to continue meeting in Rulon’s living room, they met in the more spacious rooms of the Alta Academy.

  Although the Jeffses remained in Salt Lake City, the population was growing even faster down in Short Creek, and the faithful there built the LeRoy S. Johnson Meeting House, a sparkling structure of 42,000 square feet with an ornate pulpit area and an organ to supply the music for up to four thousand people.

  The splinter group finally took a name in 1991, when leaders of the First Ward congregation founded a corporation, and chose a name that virtually parroted that of the mainstream Mormon Church, creating a great deal of confusion that continues to this day.

  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the mainstream LDS Church—has nothing to do with the polygamous sect. Nevertheless, the breakaway group made some minor changes to the name and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the FLDS, was born.

  In many other religions that have broken from an established church, such as when Martin Luther led his followers away from Catholicism, the new movement attempts to separate itself from original ideology or doctrine. However, the ragtag group of excommunicated fundamentalists in Short Creek did just the opposite. The adherents to polygamy considered themselves to be living according to a higher spiritual calling than the regular Mormon faith. They claimed the mother church had drifted from its true purpose, leaving the FLDS as the true Mormons. At one end of the spectrum, the fundamentalists try to convince people that they are Mormons, thus riding the coattails of LDS legitimacy. At the same time, they denounce the mainstream church as being filled with heretics. On any given day, whether they claim to be true Mormons or Mormon-haters depends upon what agenda they happen to be promoting at the time.

  By the time of Rulon’s ascension in 1986, the FLDS was firmly under one-man rule. The advisory council created in the formative years to put checks and balances on the actions of the president had been reduced to a “First Presidency” made up of the president (Rulon) and his first and second counselors, Parley J. Harker and Fred Jessop. The two ancient men held no real power.

  Unofficially and behind the scenes, Rulon’s son Warren had become his father’s closest advisor, although he held no office within the church. He was merely the school principal in Salt Lake City, but he held the confidence of the prophet.

  Others spoke. Warren listened. He knew the people, the inside workings of the church, and could spout scripture and give trainings with the best of them. He carefully followed his father’s path and step-by-step became the power behind the throne while his father savored the good life.

  Rulon’s appetites were insatiable. He had dozens of women, indulged freely in alcohol, and he was also a glutton, making almost daily trips to the home of his friend Ron Rohbock, who laid out feasts of rich foods accompanied by overflowing glasses of homemade wine from Rohbock’s excellent vineyards. The aging patriarch began to put on weight, and by the time he realized his health was in trouble, it was already too late.

  In 1997, Uncle Rulon suffered a series of minor strokes, and the following year, he was incapacitated by a major one. That same year, First Counselor Parley Harker died, and Warren readily stepped into that vacated leadership position. With his father crippled, Harker dead, and Second Counselor Fred Jessop old and compliant, Warren grabbed the reins. Many members who lived down in the Crick, primarily in the large Barlow clan, grumbled about this usurpation of power, but none stepped up to contest Rulon’s favored son up in Salt Lake City.

  After all, the prophet wasn’t dead, so he was still the prophet. They remembered how Uncle Roy had been laid low for years by illness, only to return to power. Rulon might recover.

  It took only about a month before Warren publicly flexed his new muscle by announcing with cold certainty, “My father has the mental capacity of a child. I am now my father’s mouthpiece.”

  Although his statement carried no legal standing within the church, it served to cap an audacious coup that could only have worked among a subservient people trained in total obedience.

  Since everyone in the faith already acknowledged that Rulon was “God’s mouthpiece on earth,” and Warren was now his father’s mouthpiece, sitting on his bed and talking with him daily, the implication was clear: God was now communicating directly with Warren through the broken vessel that was Rulon.

  The great Uncle Roy had declared that, “Only one man at a time holds the keys and power of the sealing power, and those who act during his administration are only acting under a delegated authority.” That provided Warren with plenty of cover to exert control without actually having to fight for leadership. After all, he was only helping his ailing, revered father. He remained polite and respectful in his dealings, and still did what he wanted, bulldozing his way through all obstacles by claiming that “Father” was still calling the shots. He actually took over Rulon’s big desk, leaving no question about who was really in charge.

  Rulon required constant care, and the handling of those personal needs was up to his doctors and his many wives. Warren decreed that seclusion was necessary to protect his father from the troubles and burdens of daily life and leadership. He had become an invalid confined to his bed, with great trouble articulating words, and then dementia set in due to brain damage caused by the stroke. Warren would translate for him.

  From Rulon’s bedroom, the first counselor issued a series of dire pronouncements that guaranteed the followers would look to him for guidance: The world was coming to an end!

  God would lift up the FLDS faithful, scour the world with fire, and then replace the chosen ones back down safely in the holy city of Zion, Warren declared. The date was set for September 1998, but when that came and went without incident, it was reset for October, which was another failure. A new forecast naming December as the time of reckoning also did not work out, but that did not stop Warren from continuing the drumbeat of doom, insisting the predictions came from his father. With the FLDS penchant for anniversaries, another, more certain end-of-the-world date was set for June 12, 1999, which would mark the 111th birthday of the late Uncle Roy.

  It was a big day in Short Creek, and at dawn, thousands of the faithful crowded into the meeting house for a special service. After a prayer circle, they trekked over to Cottonwood Park. All day long they waited, along with the groceries that were to sustain them during the unknown temporary time that they would be up in heaven. Nothing happened. Warren said his father was disappointed that the believers still were not strong enough in their faith to deserve this blessing.

  There was hope, however, because God was ready to grant them yet another chance. The close of the twentieth century was at hand, so they had been given another six months to sort out their behavior. If they strengthened their beliefs, the new millennium could really be the end of the planet, spelling death and destruction for everyone who was not a member in good standing of the FLDS church. This series of cataclysmic pronouncements was successful in one sense, however: it distracted the faithful from anything as insignificant as worrying about the ambitious Warren. They apparently never saw the pattern.

  CHAPTER 11

  Diversity

  Shortly after being hired to investigate the FLDS in early 2004, I received a disconcerting phone call from Carson Barlow, one of Warren Jeffs’s mo
re ardent supporters and a business associate from my construction days. We had always had an affable relationship and I thought highly of him as a hard-working family man. But he had recently been kicked out of the church, losing everything he had, and I could not imagine the inner turmoil he must be enduring. Carson was furious—but not with Warren; with me. “I’m just warning you. Get off the case or you are going to get hurt.” Getting a little testy, I asked if it would be him or Warren Jeffs administering the hurt. My bitter, broken friend kept ranting until I asked why he was still following a madman. The shock of my question quieted him for a moment, then in a quavering voice that sounded ready to cry, he said, “I reverence Warren Jeffs the same as I do God.”

  I had gotten to know special agents in the Salt Lake City office of the FBI, and I gave them a taped copy of the thinly veiled threat from Barlow. After my initial introduction to Short Creek, I was already in the habit of keeping them informed of what was happening, and of notifying them in advance when I was heading down to the Crick, just in case. I wasn’t worried about some conspiracy within the church leadership to take me out, but a troubled member who had been cast out of the FLDS just might try something on his own in order to get back into the good graces of the prophet. It was better to be careful than sorry.

  Barlow would have been much more upset had he known what we were really doing.

  Normally, a lawsuit seeks justice in the form of monetary compensation for wrongs committed against the plaintiffs. This case was different. Our clients were not after money. Most just wanted to renew the relationship with their parents and siblings instead of being forced to live as sinful outcasts. If that could not be accomplished, then they hoped to eliminate or reduce the possibility that other young men and women would be subjected to the pain, humiliation, and loss they had endured.

  Not all of them had been kicked out just for having a shirt button undone; the FLDS burrowed much deeper than that. A number of them had left home of their own accord, although out of fear that if they did not go away peacefully, something terrible would befall the family—a sister might be married off to an old lecher, or the parents would lose their home. It was not that they were wicked bad apples; they just ran out of options. It was a subtle but highly effective form of extortion.

  So our lawsuits would not be just the usual attack on polygamy; in fact, polygamy had nothing to do with it. We were going after Warren and the FLDS and the United Effort Plan in civil court but would name them as defendants for criminal acts: the rape of Brent Jeffs, and racketeering violations under the Utah version of the federal RICO statutes (spelled out in the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970). The Feds had created this tool to fight the Mafia; now it could be used in the lawsuits against the FLDS, which I considered to be a criminal organization.

  For many of the Lost Boys, the only beacon of help was the Diversity Foundation and an extraordinarily kind man by the name of Dan Fischer, a brother of my new client, Shem Fischer. Dan had once been a polygamist with three wives, but he had abandoned the practice and left the FLDS fold more than a decade before we met. He now had only one wife, but as honor dictated, he continued to help support the other two. During that decade, Fischer had become financially successful by inventing and patenting teeth-whitening systems, and he had created a nonprofit organization known as Smiles for Diversity. The organization recruited dentists and orthopedic surgeons to fix the teeth of children in Third World countries.

  Because of Dan’s reputation for helping people, desperate Lost Boys began finding their way to his doorstep. With Dan, they didn’t have to explain; he understood what they had been through and wanted to help. At first, he fed and clothed the shattered youngsters and gave them a safe place to sleep, and when all of the bedrooms of his home were filled, he converted a big maintenance garage into apartments for extra capacity. He helped them gain a sorely needed education and life skills so they could begin to understand the outside world, become independent, and move on.

  When the constant exodus of boys being exiled from their FLDS homes eventually got too big for Fischer to rescue them all on his own, he turned Smiles for Diversity into the more wide-ranging Diversity Foundation. An untold number of lives—hundreds, and perhaps thousands—have been put back together through the food, lodging, educational opportunities, and friendship provided through Diversity, under the leadership of Dan and Aleena Fischer.

  For aiding the castaways and exposing many abuses within the fundamentalist culture, the FLDS and its controlling hierarchy hated Dan Fischer with a special passion. Dan refused to reciprocate the animosity, despite an FLDS campaign of smears against him. The board of directors of the Diversity Foundation was not as forgiving. They decided that something stronger was needed from a legal standpoint to protect the children, and they hired Baltimore attorney Joanne Suder.

  My job for her was case preparation and process serving. The intense secrecy of the FLDS would make proving the case extremely difficult, but not impossible. There were scores of victims and eyewitnesses; I knew the evidence was out there, and I intended to find it.

  Joanne warned me the investigation would be a wide-ranging one that would require meticulous work, and also that she hated surprises. Like all of the attorneys with whom I work, she demanded that an investigator provide all the facts, good or bad. It is always a relief for me to hear that; it saves me from having to turn down the case. No matter what is found, it is always imperative to keep an open mind to all possibilities. In the words of Sherlock Holmes: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  However, professional objectivity did not mean that I was not personally shocked and appalled by things that would come to light in the course of my investigation, such as Warren raping children, child abandonment and neglect, and the ordeals of underage brides and families being ruined. I was not devoid of an opinion; very much to the contrary. But I draw a firm line between personal views and professional responsibility.

  Since Joanne was operating out of Baltimore, she needed an on-site attorney who could act as local counsel. She brought aboard prominent Salt Lake City lawyer Patrick A. Shea. He was a graduate of Stanford University, a Rhodes scholar, held a law degree from Harvard, and was politically connected. Shea had run unsuccessfully for both governor and senator in Utah and had served as head of the Bureau of Land Management under President Bill Clinton. Since returning to Utah from Washington, he had taught at colleges and universities and had written extensively on legal matters.

  Shea had his own private investigator, a local in Salt Lake City, and we got together to make sure that I had everything that he did. I found the guy to be a TV-style P.I., who regaled me with tales of rich and famous clients and pointed out his ten-thousand-dollar camera over here and his ten-thousand-dollar computer over there. Everything in his office apparently cost ten thousand dollars. I didn’t care. What did he actually have on the case? He handed over a three-ring binder enclosed around an inch of paper. Most of the material was straight off the Internet, available to anybody who knew how to type. The P.I. was excited. “This is going to be a big case. Jon Krakauer is on it.”

  “Who?” Never having paid much attention to famous people or bestseller lists, I wasn’t even sure who Krakauer was. This was a time for hard, sweaty digging, and I had too much legwork to do to be getting involved with celebrities.

  He gave me a disbelieving look. “He’s just one of the top five authors in the country. Jon is going to pick me up in a private jet, and we’re going to go find Warren.” The man apparently was not really familiar with Krakauer. As I would later learn, jets and celebrities weren’t Krakauer’s thing any more than they were mine.

  Jon Krakauer had been returning from a climbing trip in 1999 when he stopped for gas near Short Creek and noticed the settlement on the other side of the highway, a hazy hodgepodge of half-built houses and trailers in the distance. It seemed like something out of a Steinbeck no
vel. Curious, Krakauer decided to take a closer look.

  Crossing over the highway and going into town, he quickly began to realize that he had wandered into a different kind of place. Women working in their vegetable gardens were covered from their necks to their ankles in pioneer-style dresses that reminded him of Muslim burqas. All of the men wore long sleeves and their collars buttoned tight, and both men and women wore the same cheap sneakers. Then out of nowhere, a large 4 × 4 pickup with darkly tinted windows loomed into his rear-view mirror and began aggressively tailing him.

  Krakauer is an athletic outdoorsman who loves to explore new places and is not easily spooked; he had climbed Mount Everest and had managed (barely) to make it off the mountain with his life. However, any uninvited stranger is likely to be unnerved by a Short Creek welcome. Krakauer couldn’t shake the vigilantes following him and they became increasingly aggressive. The globe-trotting author had never experienced anything like it, at least not in this country, and he later described that first confrontation with the FLDS as having “scared the shit out of me.” He left town in a hurry.

  Since there is nobody to call for help in Short Creek, Krakauer drove on until he found a National Park ranger and reported what had happened. The ranger shrugged it off. “You were in Short Creek, the largest polygamist community in the country. That’s the way it’s been out there forever,” he explained.

  Krakauer thought a lot about the desert town as he finished the long drive to his home in Colorado. Then he did some research into the FLDS Church and realized he had stumbled onto some prime material for his next book. Krakauer spent the next four years investigating and writing Under the Banner of Heaven, the story of a couple of fundamentalist religious zealots who had stabbed a woman and her baby to death, believing that God had commanded them to commit the murders. The bestselling book would portray Short Creek as it really was, a place without joy that is run by a Taliban-style theocracy. It might never have been written if the xenophobic people of Short Creek had not run him out of town.