by Sam Brower
When the expelled Barlow men moved into a house together in another town, Warren attacked again, ruling that if they were ever to regain even the slightest chance of being forgiven by him, they could not keep each other company. If they were together, they might be tempted to commiserate about how they had been wronged and start plotting against the prophet. Once again, they blindly followed Warren’s edict, obeyed his absurd rules, and separated to live alone, with no family contact whatsoever.
The unrelenting pressure, loneliness, and humiliation eventually became too much for the elderly Louis Barlow. Once considered a candidate to lead the entire religion, he now slid into depression and debt, living off his credit cards. The old man decided that no matter what had been decreed, perhaps God might accept him into Heaven after all, so he took his own life. Suffering from congestive heart failure, Louis stopped taking his medications and died of a heart attack in May, four months after having been excommunicated.
Warren even seized that tragedy to further shame his deceased rival and the Barlow clan. He magnanimously allowed a funeral to be conducted at the meeting house and a burial in the town cemetery, but he would not allow the grave to be dedicated, a traditional and vital part of an FLDS funeral service. Jeffs claimed that Louis had not fully repented before death, so was undeserving of his priesthood blessing. At the service, the dead man’s former wives were ordered to sit beside their newly assigned husbands.
There was no longer any confusion about who was in charge of the FLDS and the millions of dollars of riches in its financial arm, the United Effort Plan.
Immediately after the Saturday Work Meeting on January 10, Warren Jeffs disappeared.
Only eleven hours and fifty minutes after delivering his blow to Short Creek, he was back in the Mancos hideout, rushing to lead the church hierarchy into what he called “deep hiding.” Elderly Uncle Fred had been quietly removed to Mancos in the middle of the night, stripped of his title as the bishop of Short Creek, and Warren instructed Fred’s wives that the old man was “gone, not to come back” to the town. Wendell Nielsen, the old ally who had filled Warren’s slot as first counselor in the presidency, would also go underground with Warren and Fred, surfacing only for special missions. Jeffs ordered his own family to scatter, and they piled into waiting vehicles and took off, destinations unknown, some joining him five hours later in Colorado.
The only newspaper in Short Creek is an irregularly published community periodical from the church, but bigger papers had been watching and had developed sources in the town. The Daily Spectrum in nearby St. George and the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake City all carried stories on the meeting in their Sunday editions on January 11. Anxious police throughout the area responded with calls to Chief Marshal Sam Roundy to offer assistance in case there was a riot. Warren sniffed at such intrusive attention by the media and the law, since he considered the political massacre to be just an internal “setting in order of the people.” He had dealt with the master deceivers and everything would now be able to return to normal.
That was not to be, for an insignificant Short Creek resident named Ross Chatwin had stormed into the mix. Chatwin had already been expelled for trying to take a second wife without permission, but Warren now learned that Chatwin, instead of being obedient, was fighting back. He had sent out hundreds of letters claiming that Louis Barlow was the rightful prophet of the FLDS. This brand-new enemy had come out of nowhere, and on January 14, the impertinent man held a news conference in which he denounced Warren as a tyrant. Short Creek was invaded by the gentiles—cops and the media—and all of Warren’s hard work to put things in order there seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Warren told his scribe, “We have no friends on earth.” He canceled a plan to return to Short Creek, using the excuse that people were waiting there to kill him. Instead, he would take a road trip.
Despite the heightened tension, some needs remained constant, according to his Record, and Warren snatched two more children as brides: Gloria Ann Steed and Veda Keate, both only thirteen years old. They were happily given to Warren by their fathers and mothers. And as the storm broke, he married two more—Loretta Jane Barlow, also thirteen, and Permelia Johnson, fifteen. In his own words in the Priesthood Record, Jeffs admitted to marrying four underage girls within a few days. He simply took them. No little girl in the faith was safe if the prophet wanted her.
Accompanied by his wife-scribe Naomi, and with his brother Leroy Jeffs and moneyman John Wayman, Jeffs took off from Mancos on Tuesday, January 27, 2004, in a two-vehicle convoy, a spacious Ford Excursion and a Ford Navigator. He claimed to be on another mission ordered by God, but in retrospect it looks more like a holiday from his troubles. The little group had only traveled across the rest of Colorado and part of Kansas before Warren started making horrendous pronouncements concerning God’s “judgments.” Naomi recorded them: “There is such a dark spirit everywhere of great wickedness. The people on this land are only worthy to be swept off.”
In the cold of winter, Jeffs tracked back to the very roots of Mormonism. Upon reaching the environs of Independence, Missouri, he stepped through a carpet of light snow in fifteen-degree weather to explore the place that once had been set apart as the site for a future temple by the early Mormons, although none was ever built there. Jeffs had first seen it during a three-month coast-to-coast trip the previous year, when he was out sizing up possible places of refuge. The site holds significance to the mainstream Mormon Church, but Warren wanted to rededicate it in behalf of the FLDS. He stood tall with both his arms held out on the square and prayed for the Almighty to strip the land of its current population of hundreds of thousands of people, so Jeffs could build “the New Jerusalem and the temple in Jackson County, Missouri.”
It showed an evolution in his thinking. The FLDS had always clung to the idea that they were far beyond needing anything like a real temple, because they had lost the right to enter Mormon temples when they were excommunicated a century earlier. In the recent decades, however, prophets had made reference to the FLDS still not needing any temple, at least until after the end of the world, when everyone else had perished. Warren was now seriously thinking about that.
While on their trip, they also visited the Carthage Jail in Carthage, Illinois, where LDS Church founder Joseph Smith had been murdered by a mob on June 27, 1844. Warren repeatedly compared himself to Joseph, even claiming that he, too, would one day be called upon to reveal ancient texts that would become canonized into scripture. He surveyed the room in which Smith had been assassinated, saw the bullet hole in the door, and examined the window from which Smith had fallen. What image did he take away from that historic scene? “The room was quite small,” he noted in what would become a persistent, peculiar refrain.
Early on the final day of January 2004, a Saturday, the little caravan crossed the Mississippi River and hurried to Nauvoo, Illinois. The early Mormons, when driven from their homes in western Missouri, had reclaimed this once swampy land and built a thriving city on it. Then it was on to Ohio, where Warren’s troop did some laundry before heading to Palmyra, New York, and the Hill Cumorah, where a large statue of the angel Moroni marks the spot where Joseph Smith retrieved the golden plates bearing the runes that created Mormonism.
But Warren was at a loss as to why God had sent him on this particular trip in the middle of winter. Something continued to gnaw at him: Why did God and the angels and saints appear in humble surroundings? In a fit of clairvoyance and characteristic hubris, he proclaimed in the Record that while God and His messengers sometimes did drop into modest places, the Lord really wanted “a temple where He can appear in honor and glory to His faithful people.”
After that declaration of God’s true wishes, twisted to fit his own dream, Warren headed back west. The breakaway religion that had prided itself on never needing a temple was about to get a monumental one.
CHAPTER 19
There to Stay
The FLDS quest fo
r secrecy in Texas would fail. Residents in and around Eldorado had not yet discovered the truth of what was unfolding with their reclusive new neighbors, but they did not like the rumors they were hearing.
They began asking questions of Schleicher County sheriff David Doran, an affable man of medium build with a mustache, and dark hair that is usually hidden beneath a cowboy hat. He was in his third term, knew his county well, and had been carefully watching the dramatic changes at the old ranch. Among those asking were his old friends Randy and Kathy Mankin, the publishers of the weekly Eldorado Success newspaper. Few outsiders knew more about the odd goings-on out at the ranch than the unflappable Mankins.
Randy was a hometown boy who had spent his younger years as a Texas oil wildcatter, a job that had taken him away from his roots. When he had had enough of the oil fields, he and Kathy had bought the newspaper and settled into what they had anticipated to be life in a sleepy small town. Then came the FLDS, and everything changed. The Success office was only a few miles from the front gate. In the months to come, Randy and Kathy would be reporting breaking news on the hottest story going. The little newspaper with about 1,100 subscribers would regularly scoop the bigger media.
The presence in town of the inquisitive newspaper ensured that there would be publicity when the mysteries of Eldorado started to unravel, which happened only two days before the end of February 2004. On that day, Ben Johnson, one of Warren’s drivers and bodyguards, was stopped by a highway patrolman because the license plate on his vehicle was obscured. When a bloodied arrow was discovered, Johnson said he had been out hunting, and the patrolman summoned game wardens, who insisted on seeing the dead deer. Johnson had to take them onto the Zion property, where the visitors were surprised by the scope of the construction that was under way. Three multistory wooden buildings were going up among the scrub trees, and cargo storage containers littered the area.
Warren instructed presiding elder Ernest Jessop, who was in charge of the compound at the time, to lie and stick with the fabricated cover story. Jessop told the authorities that the workers there were merely an out-of-state construction crew building a private corporate hunting retreat. The materials in the big storehouse where the deer had been taken held food and other supplies for the crews and their families, he said. The game wardens took Ben Johnson, the archer, to court, where a two-hundred-dollar fine for poaching was levied by Justice of the Peace Jimmy Doyle.
The fine became a minor issue when Doyle declared that he was very familiar with the property; he was the pilot of a Piper Cherokee 180 airplane that frequently flew overhead, keeping a distant eye on them. Doyle had dug up information about unlicensed refrigeration and freezer rooms. Johnson quickly obtained the needed permits and headed back to the ranch to report. The “private hunting lodge” was not going over with the locals, and before long, Warren told his scribe, “The government officials of that county, Schleicher County, know of us.”
Early in 2004, the prophet and I were finally starting to cross paths. While Jeffs was planning Zion, I had just started working for Ross Chatwin, hoping to help him keep his house in Short Creek. Within a few more months, I would be deeply involved with the Lost Boys case and the rape case involving Brent Jeffs and his brothers. By the end of the year, Warren and I would be in each other’s cross-hairs.
One evening during that time, as he was picking at dinner with some members of his large family, a wife approached and whispered into his ear. The prophet, looking angry, stopped eating. Another concerned wife at the table, hoping to console him, asked what the trouble was. “It’s that gentile investigator Sam Brower—he keeps popping up where he’s not wanted!” responded the prophet.
Unfortunately, I learned a hard lesson during that first year that Warren Jeffs and his FLDS had remained all but invisible to outsiders. It was difficult to overstate what was going on in Short Creek, and it was equally impossible for anyone who had not been there to understand it. One result was that even the various investigations into Warren Jeffs and his FLDS were fragmented. Somehow, part of my task became building bridges between law enforcement and child protection agencies in several states, and between the locals and the federal authorities. That was a far cry from what I had originally signed on to do, but the farther along I went, the less choice I had.
One of the capable investigators involved in this uncoordinated effort was Ron Barton, from the office of Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff. Barton had been doing a lot of digging, but he was hamstrung by orders to gather information without making waves. Nevertheless, he managed to pull together a lot of evidence of FLDS illegal practices, especially within the police department. But there seemed to be a lot of tension between Shurtleff and Barton, who left about the time I came on board.
I originally had entertained high hopes for Shurtleff, who had an impressive record as a prosecutor before winning the attorney general position in 2001. Shurtleff is quick on his feet and had a strong law-and-order stance. Here was someone with the clout to get to the bottom of what was going on in the Crick. But when it came time to prosecute on Barton’s hard work, the AG didn’t follow through, which frustrated Barton into resigning.
Barton was replaced by another state investigator, Jim Hill, who repeated the basic investigative exercise. Hill was in the middle of assembling more information when he, too, was reassigned off the FLDS case. He shortly thereafter quit the AG’s office.
I liked Shurtleff; he is one of those guys that is hard to get mad at. But as the months progressed, I heard a lot more from the attorney general in the press than I actually saw him doing. I eventually came to the realization that Shurtleff was no different from any other politician, trying to back his own agenda. When we needed AG help the most, he seemed to pull back from the sticky situation.
No longer having a permanent home of his own, the prophet was wearing ruts in the highways of the West with his secretive travels, living in motel rooms when on the road and not near a hideout. He had found a new place of refuge, which he code-named R-23, in a forest some 4,600 feet above sea level in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and added it to his temporary nests.
No matter where he was, Warren was constantly working: editing and recording his Priesthood Record dictations to his trusted Naomi, preaching back to the meeting house by telephone, undoing some marriages, performing new ones, judging letters of contrition, collecting money, and micromanaging decisions on the smallest day-to-day details of his flock and the various construction projects. Women chosen for the refuges were instructed to stay close to their buildings and not to shop in surrounding towns, even if that required making trips over hundreds of miles to distant stores.
He always returned to Texas, where his masterpiece was being built. He traveled all over the ranchland and listened as the Lord filled in the temple’s details for him. There would be four levels. A baptismal font would be placed in the basement, and the “telestial” floor on ground level would have light green flooring and seats. The carpet and chairs in the light blue second-floor “terrestrial” floor would be linked by a staircase of white carpet to the all-white “celestial” top floor, with rooms for a “School of the Prophets.” Warren secretly turned to the Internet to find out how the mainstream LDS church had designed its temples, and then he copied the results, saying they were God’s special instructions to him. As the weeks passed, there were satisfying moments, such as when God decided on the kitchen tiles; there were also setbacks, as when Warren reported that the Lord rejected the materials for the drapes and sheer curtains upstairs. Apparently, no detail was too minor for divine scrutiny.
The most shocking order came when Warren directed the building of a special bed to be used in temple rituals. He said that God revealed to him during one of his heavenly sessions that it would be a special table of strong hardwood that would be placed in the most sacred area of the temple—the Holy of Holies. His specific instructions, entered in his record, called for a “… table on wheels that could be converted into
a sturdy bed when the top was removed. On the right would be a cushioned prayer bench that could be folded away and hidden when not in use … The bed will be a size big enough for me to lay on it … It will be covered with a sheet, but it will have a plastic cover to protect the mattress from what will happen on it—and ropes.” A dozen chairs would surround it and a podium would overlook it.
“Something is going to happen in that room,” he predicted in his journal, then repeated it: “Something is going to happen in that room.”
On the second day of March 2004, Warren picked out still two more children to become his wives: Mildred “Millie” Marlene Blackmore, age thirteen, and Annie LaRee Jessop, who would not turn fifteen for another week. Their fathers were Merril Jessop, now a rising power in the FLDS, and Brandon Blackmore, one of the Canadians. The men, probably, had no objections, since they were not expelled from the church, thus committing various felonies with their silence in handing their little girls over to the pedophile prophet.
That night, Warren confessed to his scribe one reason for his compulsion to take immature brides. “These young girls have been given to me to be taught and trained how to come into the presence of God and help redeem Zion from their youngest years before they go through teenage doubting and boy troubles. I will be their boy trouble and guide them right.” In other words, he could brainwash, mold, and molest them to his liking. Naomi was usually assigned the task of training the new girls on how a “heavenly comfort wife” should behave. Using language that a child could understand, she told them not to be afraid, and to stand back in silence when their new husband went into a “heavenly session”—or more accurately, a revelation fit, which might consist of falling down and writhing on the floor or might evolve into a sexual encounter with one or more of his heavenly comfort wives.