by Sam Brower
While his mind might be slipping, the stroke-crippled Rulon still had a sexual appetite, or at least imagined that he did, at ninety-two years of age. Sometimes, a new wife would be shocked to get a wet French kiss from the old man after the evening meal. When one girl proved reluctant to comply with the elderly Rulon’s wish for some unconventional sex, Warren set her straight in a hurry: God’s command was to “give yourself to your husband mind, body, and soul.” In other words, do whatever Rulon wanted. To do otherwise would jeopardize her status as a mother in Zion. Since there is no such thing as sex education within the FLDS culture, when a young girl was placed with a depraved older man, it would usually be a confusing and crushing experience. She often had little or no idea about sex. Warren, acting as his father’s self-appointed pimp, kept track of what was happening, and he would be furious if the concubines did not “keep sweet” and comply with the arranged sexual liaisons.
On a visit down south from Canada, Winston Blackmore was shocked at the fresh new crop of young girls ranging in age from twenty-one down to fifteen entering the Jeffs family. The bishop asked what was going on. Rulon replied, “I don’t know. Ask Warren. Why am I being married to all these young girls?” Uncle Rulon married some of them while he was abed, delirious and unaware of what was happening. Marriage licenses, of course, were not required; simply a “sealing” ritual by someone in the church hierarchy who was authorized by the prophet to conduct the ceremony was sufficient. The ceremony had absolutely no legal standing, especially since it was usually performed in conjunction with the crimes of child abuse and/or polygamy.
Warren continued placing new spouses with his father up until only six months before the decrepit prophet’s mortal ministry came to an end. It finally took a direct, desperate plea from Rulon himself—“No more wives!”—to make Warren stop.
On the surface, the purpose of the onslaught of marriages was to benefit Rulon. Underlying that fact was Warren maneuvering toward a completely different and sordid purpose: He intended to marry some of his stepmothers into his own growing harem when the old man passed away.
Another myth that has come down in FLDS lore is that the final destruction of the earth will be so complete that “not a yellow dog will be left to wag its tail.” In the summer of 2001, that nightmare would come true in Short Creek.
With Uncle Rulon physically fading, Warren needed to test his own support. Was it real? Had his incessant “trainings” and sermons programmed the believers strongly enough to ensure that they would follow him automatically? Could he count on their blind obedience and loyalty when he took the ultimate leadership role? A horrible tragedy provided the opening for him to test them. Best of all, the target of this grim scheme was one of the rare gentile converts in their midst, who I will refer to as Mike, so not too many people in the Crick really cared much about what happened to him or his family. No matter how devout their beliefs, converts are never really accepted as anything more than second-class citizens.
In June 2001, a chained-up guard dog that was used for breeding attacked, mauled, and killed the family’s baby boy. Soon afterward, at the meeting house, Uncle Fred Jessop told the congregants that Prophet Rulon had received a heavenly revelation that pets had no place in the Kingdom of God, not among the pure and clean people of the priesthood. Henceforth, no dogs would be allowed. Everyone understood that this was really Warren talking. Warren didn’t like dogs.
Uncle Fred was passionate from the pulpit that day. Not giving up your pet would be an act of disobedience, proving that you lacked faith. Your standing in the priesthood would be in question, which could lead to expulsion from the church and community. Citizens of Short Creek would be given some time to rid themselves of their pets voluntarily, but after that, assigned crews of churchmen led by that peculiar pair of enforcers, Willie and Dee Jessop, would be called on to finish the job.
Local law would not be involved in the massacre. Although the cops were thoroughly in service to the FLDS, this nasty piece of work fell to the church’s hooligans without badges. To be called to service in such a position was a rare opportunity for these men to distinguish themselves from the rank-and-file membership. They could move about the community and force compliance from the disobedient, which meant that now they were somebody!
When the grace period expired for people to have disposed of their pets, the gang came in to round up the dogs that had not been given away. They started with the strays, but soon they were snatching pets from the arms of their owners. Dee Jessop went through the streets like a destroying angel, fulfilling his macabre mission. Willie would often be parked in a conspicuous spot nearby to intervene if there was any backlash from a brokenhearted family member.
The captured dogs were driven in trucks out of town to the far side of a sylvan setting known as Berry Knoll, where dusk almost always brings a double sunset as the sun slides down two mountains that nearly touch at Canaan Gap. Not only is light magnified out there, but so is the sound. Residents of the Crick would hear the squeal of a pickup truck’s tires on the pavement in town, then not long afterward would come the wail of a dog, as if through a megaphone, followed by a gunshot out by Berry Knoll.
Finally, the guns were deemed too noisy for the job and the killers came up with the idea of clamping jumper cables from the powerful batteries of big pickup trucks onto the animals to electrocute them. Instead of gunshots, the howls of the tortured dogs rent the night air.
There are no more dogs or cats to be found in Short Creek or other Jeffs-run FLDS strongholds to this day. For Warren Jeffs, it was a diabolical test of loyalty: If he could get people to surrender their pets to the executioner, he could continue pushing the envelope and demand even greater sacrifices. The ready-made scapegoat, Mike, was left to shoulder any emotional blame. After all, it was his dog and his child that had precipitated the drastic measures. Warren threw him out of the church and nobody cared.
Rulon Jeffs was aware throughout 2002 that he was barely clinging to life. One day as he shuffled along on his walk with a group of wives and children assisting him, the prophet told them he was tired of living, and the helpers would not be burdened with this escort duty much longer. He struck a fist on his chest and called out, “I am so sick of this decrepit body! When do I get to go?”
The answer was: not yet. He still had some usefulness for his heir apparent.
The reign of Winston Blackmore as the prophet’s right-hand man in Canada ended abruptly with a single phone call from the ailing Rulon in the summer of 2002. Blackmore was in his truck with a visitor from Short Creek, Ezra Draper, who heard every word over the speakerphone, and Winston himself later confirmed the incident for me.
Winston was well aware that his old friend Rulon was no longer mentally stable, but although the old man stumbled as he groped for words, he laid down the law: Blackmore was dismissed as the bishop of Bountiful. He was instructed to surrender his wives, was removed as a UEP trustee, and was ordered to turn all of his business assets over to the UEP.
Draper said that after each pronouncement, there would be a pause in the conversation, and they could hear the voice of Warren Jeffs in the background coaching his father on what to say next. The old man would repeat those words verbatim. “Rulon Jeffs didn’t even know who he was talking to,” Draper recalled. “Warren told him what to say, sentence by sentence.”
When Ezra Draper returned home to Short Creek, he feigned innocence and asked Warren how the dismissal of the Canadian bishop had gone. Warren beamed with pride. “Ezra, Father handled that situation all by himself.”
The blood-atonement attempt involving Vanessa Rohback was a side issue by then, but Winston’s defiance had been remembered by Warren. His revenge for that embarrassment was to engineer the removal of Blackmore as a potential rival for leadership of the FLDS. Warren later dispatched his “God Squad” enforcer Willie Jessop up to Canada to make sure that Winston understood that he no longer “held priesthood.” Blackmore, though, was unafraid of the bull
y and refused to recognize Warren’s claims of authority.
There was fallout anytime someone crossed Warren Jeffs, who kept track of every perceived trespass in his little notebook. He eventually expelled both Ezra Draper and his brother, David, and told them there was no hope of their getting back in. Ezra managed to leave with most of his family intact, but David was devastated at losing his family and everything he had. Ezra made a luncheon appointment to talk with his distraught brother, but David did not show up. His body was found in the wreckage of his truck at the bottom of Hurricane Mesa, about twenty miles from Short Creek, along with a suicide note. As Warren’s appetite for power grew, so did the body count of devastated victims, both literally and figuratively.
That the end was near for Rulon was probably obvious to his scheming son; in fact, it couldn’t have been going better if he had actually personally planned it that way.
Several years would pass before I was able to piece together the dramatic final sequence of events through personal interviews with people who were there, recordings of the services, and the descriptions detailed in Warren’s Priesthood Record. It was a macabre glimpse into the final days of a religious monarch and the rise of his ambitious successor.
Rulon Timpson Jeffs finally died on September 8, 2002. He was rushed to the hospital in septic shock from an obstructed bowel and was in such dire condition that doctors estimated he had only a five-percent chance of survival if they performed surgery, and no chance at all without it. “It does not matter what they say, the Lord is in charge,” Warren told his brother Isaac. The old man’s blood pressure was very low, but suddenly it rose enough for the doctors to operate—a miracle. “We knew he was going to walk out of there. No question,” said Isaac.
Rulon was grimacing on a respirator as the medical staff wheeled him to the operating theater aboard a gurney. When he was returned to the intensive care unit, his heart began to stutter. Family and friends knelt in prayer circles as CPR, then electric shock treatment, were performed. Warren was on his knees on the floor at his dying father’s bedside. “I could not think of anything else but his renewal in this life. But as I witnessed his final breath and his heart stop, and I wanted to cry unto the Lord to intervene now, but the good Spirit whispered, ‘Peace. This is the Lord’s will.’ ”
Still, the actual death seemed to surprise almost everyone, as they waited patiently for Rulon to be renewed into his former youthful self. It had become a matter of faith that Rulon, as the living prophet, would be the one who would finally hand the keys of the kingdom over to the returned savior, Jesus Christ. In reality, all he did was die. And the keys were snatched away by his conniving son.
The legion of shaken wives had believed the promises made to them of eternal life, that Rulon would be changed in the twinkling of an eye back into his vibrant prime. God had raised the dead in the Scriptures; surely the prophet deserved the same blessing. “There was no doubt in my mind that he would just come back,” one of the many widows told me. “God would touch him and he would be made young in every sense of the word. He would be able to walk around with us and know our names, and have time for us and things like that.”
When Rulon was buried four days later, their faith still had not wavered. “At the funeral it was just so freaky and so hard,” a wife remembered. “When they shut the casket for the last time, it was like … No, you can’t do that! He’s going to bang on it and say, ‘What the hell are you guys doing?’ We truly expected that.”
With angelic sweetness, a choir of wives sang an original five-minute composition entitled “Our Prophet Is Caught Up,” which included the words, “He shall come forth again to earth and lead his people on.” Warren stood tall beside the grave, and some of the women said he was aglow with heavenly brightness.
His long wait for power was over.
CHAPTER 14
Stepmothers and Wives
Warren Jeffs wasted no time grieving for his father; he had a religion to run. It was also time to start cashing in on his aspirations, and his first item was taking the women he wanted from his father’s harem. He stepped before a special leadership meeting two days after Rulon’s death and coldly announced: “I’m here to tell you men, hands off my father’s wives!”
He explained, “Now I understand what father was doing, building up his family, so I could carry on.” He had first choice, and the rest would be reassigned to loyal men whom he selected—and who would then be stuck with the financial responsibility of caring for the less desirable wives and children.
By announcing his intention to wed many of his own stepmothers, he broke a taboo, which shook the entire FLDS. Many contended that it was a violation of the Biblical Law of Moses, which stated that a man shall not marry his father’s wives. Those accusations led Warren to formulate rambling rationalizations and revelations from God, which he would dispense to the flock as needed, like scattering feed before chickens. “People are searching the history, and they can’t quite match up the present situation with anything else,” he said, according to a section of his Record.
If people did not understand his logic, it obviously was their fault because their hearts were dark. Opponents were warned that they were “treading down the path to apostasy” by criticizing his work toward the “celestialization of this earth.” What he was really saying, in words cloaked in piety, was that opposing opinions would be dealt with swiftly and severely.
Many of Rulon’s wives reeled at what they perceived to be incest, so Warren sweet-talked and perplexed them with revelations from beyond the grave. “Every one of you ladies, my mothers, are worth more than worlds to Father. Through you he will bring forth sons and daughters that will become gods here and in the spirit world, and those gods will create worlds upon worlds.”
It was confusing. Warren had a way of speaking in tangled sentences that meant nothing, but slowly they understood that he intended to bed and have children by them because that was “Father’s and God’s will.” He was speaking in the present tense, as if Rulon were standing in the room. Trained throughout their entire lives to be docile in the face of a man’s authority, most eventually agreed.
One absolutely refused. “Lorraine” had been married to Rulon for seven years and was an anomaly among FLDS women. She had somehow managed to grow up with a mind of her own, and she was willing to challenge Warren’s advances toward her and her sister-wives. She would not be bullied. Warren wanted this beautiful woman badly, but she was equally adamant about having nothing to do with him. Finally, in a fit of frustration and desperation, he glared at her with maniacal fierceness, wagged his bony index finger in her face, and promised, “I’m going to break you, young lady.”
At that point, Lorraine knew her life would become a living hell if she did nothing to protect herself. That very evening, she decided to leave the FLDS rather than endure the punishment certain to come her way for refusing to marry the demented son of her late husband. Lorraine literally went over the wall of the Jeffs’s compound and escaped.
Another special wife was Mary Fischer, the nurse and sister of Dan Fischer, who had constantly tended Rulon prior to his death. She knew everything about both Rulon and Warren, and Warren was concerned that Mary would turn against him, like her brothers Dan and Shem. He could not risk losing “Mother Mary” to the world and having her reveal her secrets to the authorities, so he persuaded her to marry him. Afterward, he kept her in hiding, virtually as a voluntary prisoner. She, like many other women, had become a victim of circumstance, and she had nowhere else to go. She would only emerge occasionally, when her nursing skills were needed within the closed society, and then she would be ferreted off to a new hiding place to avoid detection.
Polygamy is the heart of FLDS doctrine, and Warren Jeffs was going to see to it that he had more wives than anyone else, even if it meant marrying his mothers. I have personally counted more than eighty wives, and others peg the number at better than ninety. Within a few years of seizing power, he would brag in a
sermon before a huge gathering of FLDS members that heavenly father had revealed to him that he would have one hundred wives.
After throwing a fence around his stepmothers, Warren turned his attention to consolidating his leadership. He would later write, “All of the people are asking, ‘Who did Uncle Rulon appoint?’ ”
Warren acknowledged that within the governing body of the church, there was nothing to show that he was the legitimate heir. The FLDS has never had an organized right of succession—no rule book and no protocol to fall back on—and so historically, an internal fight would usually ensue when the top position came open. Warren knew that he had to be smarter, faster, more ruthless, and quicker on his feet than any rival.
His closest potential rival was the faithful Fred Jessop, the bishop of Short Creek. Uncle Fred had been around a very long time, and had earned a loyal base of followers. Dissident Flora Jessop, the daughter of one of his half-brothers, described Uncle Fred in her book Church of Lies as “a mover and a shaker in the FLDS and rich to boot.”
During the reign of Rulon Jeffs, Uncle Fred handled affairs concerning the town, including the collection of church tithes, 10 percent of everyone’s income. The tall, quiet man had remained as the faithful second counselor without protest when Warren had usurped the position of first counselor back in 1997.
Uncle Fred, however, was tragically flawed by something that would never permit him to be the official leader of a cultish religion that expects men to be the fertile producers of squadrons of youngsters. He was sterile. Physically unable to have kids of his own, Fred built his own large family of reassigned wives and children, widows, and orphans. The package was a stew with many ingredients, and the residents of Short Creek loved him for being such a benevolent benefactor. Warren had to tread lightly in dealing with Uncle Fred.