by Sam Brower
That was the last that Suzanne heard from her. The following day, their mother came to Suzanne’s place in Hildale to deliver a message: “I don’t know what’s going on, but Janetta told me to tell you, ‘Never mind.’ ” Suzanne asked why her sister had not called her directly, and the mother shrugged. “Well, you know Uncle Warren has to be in hiding right now. It just has to be this way for a while.”
Knowing that calling the Short Creek police would be a useless exercise, and desperate to help Janetta, Suzanne and Lester instead phoned Winston Blackmore. He called me, and I felt a surge of adrenaline rushing through my veins. I was furious about this little girl being handed over to the prophet on her sixteenth birthday by her proud parents. That would make three of their daughters in the prophet’s household, quite a coup for Frank Jessop, as valuable as a truckload of gold in that cult. Janetta was in trouble, and we had to find her.
The situation was the sort of opportunity for which I had been waiting. It is a felony in Utah for a man to marry an underage girl who is ten or more years younger than himself. Warren was about fifty at the time, and Janetta sixteen. If we could persuade her to tell authorities what had happened to her, confirm the sham marriage on the record, there would not only be civil matters pending and under investigation, but possible criminal charges, too. Every cop in the land, except those around Short Creek, would be looking for Warren Jeffs. Taking it one step farther, if she would testify, it would also help focus some much-needed national attention on the plight of young girls in Short Creek.
It could not have happened at a better time. I had some dependable law enforcement help. Riding in from the West, as the storybooks say, came Gary Engels, a no-nonsense former homicide investigator hired by Mohave County, Arizona, specifically to monitor what was happening in Short Creek. Gary had been wounded in the line of duty, he was fearless, and he would never back down from any church goons. It would not be long before the entire town hated him as he dug into the FLDS criminal organization.
We would become close friends during the coming months, and we were happy to have each other as backup. Often, as we drove around Short Creek together, it seemed that we were the only two sane people on an otherwise screwball planet. In many such moments, we would adjourn to Gary’s office, a double-wide modular trailer that had been set up on the edge of town on a rented rare piece of land that was not owned or controlled by the FLDS church. We dubbed it “Fort Apache,” and it became our only sanctuary in an area where we felt surrounded by hostiles.
We made a good pair and, at the time, we were the only two investigators in the trenches actively working cases involving the FLDS. If a possible crime was involved, I always made Gary aware of it.
Gary was still brand new to the job when Janetta Jessop telephoned her sister for help. The case was his baptism by fire, and he went after it hard, as was his style. Janetta’s family lived on the Arizona side of Short Creek, within his jurisdiction, which gave him the authority to open an investigation. But Suzanne Johnson, who had received the distress call, lived on the Utah side. That invisible border had bedeviled real law enforcement for decades.
The FLDS can run back and forth across it as they will, but a police officer with the wrong badge may end up hamstrung. Because of the jurisdictional mess, the first thing I advised Suzie Johnson to do was file a missing persons report with the Washington County sheriff’s office on the Utah side. They are the closest legitimate law enforcement agency, although Sheriff Kirk Smith was never pleased to have a Short Creek case dumped in his lap.
A Washington County deputy was instructed to telephone Janetta’s parents, who naturally said that she was safe and sound at home. That was “case closed” as far as the sheriff’s office was concerned. I couldn’t believe they would have made such a careless phone call, which tipped off the parents that the authorities were now looking for their daughter. That meant that any opportunity of finding her without alerting Warren had evaporated.
Suzie and Lester raised such a fuss about this that the sheriff agreed to send someone to verify whether Janetta was really at the house.
A county detective knocked on the door of Frank Jessop. He had not been provided with a current photo of the girl for whom he was allegedly searching. The detective saw two girls wearing long dresses and the swept-up plyg-do hairstyle, but neither showed identification and the detective was not allowed to talk to them. When the parents assured him that one of girls was the missing Janetta, the detective said, “Okay,” and left. The sheriff’s office in Utah had done what it had to do, and no more.
I was frustrated and concerned at the seeming apathy I was encountering in some of the law enforcement agencies. They had ignored Short Creek for so long, allowing the community itself to handle any problems within the little theocracy, that I felt they needed a push to start treating the Crick like the rest of the country.
Jon Krakauer, untroubled by borders, stepped forward and wrote a detailed news release about the missing girl on November 12, 2004. It carried the boldface headline, UTAH SHERIFF WON’T INVESTIGATE CALL FOR HELP FROM UNDERAGE BRIDE OF POLYGAMIST LEADER WARREN JEFFS. If the media picked up the story, the Utah sheriff’s office might finally feel compelled to actively get involved.
The news release worked. It led to appearances by Sheriff Kirk Smith and me on the nationally televised news show Deborah Norville Live, where we discussed the case in separate interviews. Smith defended his department’s actions in public. The undersheriff was so steamed about me pressuring them to do their job that he called me and threatened to arrest me for filing a false police report. That was ridiculous: The missing person report was not false, and I hadn’t filed it; Suzie Johnson had.
Gary Engels also had been fuming about the inaction on the Utah side. He was not used to walking away from a challenge, and he made plans of his own to try to get a one-on-one with the girl, away from her parents. They lived on the Arizona side, which was his turf. He ignored the locals in Short Creek and launched his own investigation, bypassing the sheriff’s office in Washington County. He arranged for some Arizona Child Protective Services workers to go to the house for a surprise visit, backed up by Arizona deputies. I followed with Suzanne in my car.
A deputy knocked on the door, but there was no answer. We weren’t surprised. My sources had warned me long ago that all FLDS residents in Short Creek had instructions from church leaders not to answer the knock of anyone who does not first call ahead. We were about to leave when Suzanne spotted her mother’s car coming down the street, with Janetta in the passenger seat. When she saw that we were at the house, Mrs. Jessop kept driving right past the driveway. I pointed and yelled, “There they go!”
The deputies pulled her over a short distance away as I drove up along with the CPS people. Janetta and Suzanne fell into a tearful embrace as their mother went into a tirade, shouting the automatic FLDS response about how government could not take away her child.
The Short Creek police arrived and demanded to know why they had not been consulted. Gary responded in his usual professional manner, although I could tell he was tempted to laugh in the faces of the local cops for asking such an absurd question. Janetta was ferried to neutral territory at a children’s justice center in nearby St. George, Utah, for an interview.
Our hopes for a big break now lay on the frail shoulders of young Janetta, who was overwhelmed by what was happening. The CPS workers spent four hours with her and determined that her shaky physical and mental states were in part due to large amounts of drugs such as Xanax and Prozac. She appeared to be near to the point of incoherence.
Janetta had spent time with some of Warren’s other concubines at the R-1 compound in Mancos, Colorado, where she had been moved after Warren took her into his fold on her sixteenth birthday. Once again, since it was not a legal marriage but an FLDS imitation, no laws had been broken. She was to complete her training there to become a “heavenly comfort wife” and learn the importance of keeping sacred things secret. She wo
uld get out of bed at four in the morning, say her prayers, then feed the birds in the chicken coop. Such superficial descriptions of her daily life were a start, but not really helpful.
She would not elaborate on where she had been for the past year and would not discuss her relationship to Warren Jeffs. Once again it appeared that the guilt and brainwashing that had been instilled in her, and her fear that she might be putting her salvation in jeopardy, stopped her from speaking out against the prophet. The family and church had gotten to her before we intervened. Janetta’s most frequent answer, repeated over and over, was, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
My hope of finding someone willing to come forth and tell the whole story of what had happened to her was dashed, but by this point in my investigation, I had learned not to expect much; nothing was easy in dealing with an entire culture that was so completely dysfunctional. I had to be patient and thorough.
Only later did I piece together what Warren claimed had happened to Janetta. In one of his “heavenly sessions” recorded in his journal, Warren justified what he did by making the ridiculous assertion that “evil powers” had made Janetta tiptoe in the night to the room of Warren’s own son, Mosiah, with the desire to have sex with him. According to Warren, Mosiah later confessed an attraction to her, so despite the fact that nothing had taken place between them, and that Janetta had never even entered the room, they both complied with the prophet’s insistence that they confess the sins of their hearts. Warren then banished them from R-1 and sent Janetta further into hiding in Nevada.
Putting together the interviews I had with her sister over time, plus the prophet’s record, the story emerged that when the supposedly errant young wife got caught phoning her sister and planning to escape, and word came that police were involved, Janetta was sent back to her family in Short Creek to avoid further scrutiny by the law. Her father was given the responsibility of bringing her back under control, so that she might one day again prove herself to be a worthy wife of the prophet.
As disappointed as I was that Janetta would not talk, I was more surprised at the effect that her story had on me. It had very little shock value. Crimes had been committed against this young girl and only a handful of people cared enough to even try to rescue her. It was maddening, but as the case had gone on, I found myself growing more matter-of-fact about the sick, hidden sins of Short Creek.
The truth is that an investigator cannot survive and be effective if he walks around in a constant state of shock. You have to put the outrage aside and do your job.
Poor Janetta was another young girl abused by the FLDS—one among so many. As usual, I would stay in touch with her sister in case something else developed, but I had to move on and think of the thousands of other children who still might be helped.
Christmas does not exist in Short Creek. Warren had declared all holidays to be a distraction for the people and proclaimed Christmas in particular to be evil and idolatrous. He weighed this as another chance to test how far the people would go in obeying his seemingly irrational commandments. There was little resistance about the ban on the Christmas holidays. With no bright lights or outdoor decorations, no toys, no trees with ornaments, and no joy, Short Creek seemed even more dreary than usual as 2004 wound to a close.
That did not mean the fundamentalists were idle.
Aerial photos of the ranch outside of Eldorado, Texas, had been gathering on my desk, and they showed the progression of a large, new project down there. A wide, flat area had been cleared and the latest photos showed that a huge foundation was being laid, with footings approximately eight feet wide by six feet thick. Whatever was going in there would be enormous.
Rumors were circulating that it was to be a temple. To most untrained observers, it was just another manifestation of Warren’s eccentricities; but to me, it was evidence that Warren was taking his revelations of doom to the next level. Previous FLDS leaders had always been very vocal about not needing a temple, at least until the end of the world. I considered the sudden emergence of a temple to be significant, and worrisome.
Nothing happened over Christmas in 2004, but Jon Krakauer and I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that something was up. We devised a plan to split the New Year’s duty and try to cover all of the bases. Gary Engels and I could keep an eye on Short Creek because we were invited to a New Year’s Eve party there at the home of Marvin Wyler, the father of Ross Chatwin. Marvin also had been tossed out of the church but, like a handful of others who had been excommunicated, he refused to leave Short Creek. Jon volunteered to travel to Eldorado and check out the Texas compound.
The party was a rare opportunity for Gary and me to meet some more of the increasing number of FLDS refugees in a social setting as opposed to formal interviews. No longer having to abide by the onerous rules laid down by Warren Jeffs, they could celebrate the holidays as they pleased. We were surprised to find that the gathering had grown into a large event. About sixty people—representing most of the excommunicated and isolated families in the area—dropped by Marvin’s well-worn house on the Arizona side that night.
Gary and I had grown accustomed to being vilified in this town, and it was pleasant to be able to just relax a little with people who knew that we were on their side. Presents were exchanged, and at midnight, the kids shot off fireworks. Some people in Short Creek were actually having a good time! That scared the heck out of the cops. Police cars circled the house seventeen times in the space of one hour, looking for a reason to stop the party, but no laws, not even their made-up kind, were being broken. Fireworks were not illegal in the state and the streaks of sparks in the night and the firecracker pops made the house seem like a little oasis of merriment as the rest of the town hunkered down, dark and fearful. I was given a thick glass drinking mug decorated with ribbon and filled with home-made candy.
We stood out as oddities, of course, but everyone wanted to shake our hands and ask what was going on with the legal side of things. They were curious about the missing prophet. Those at the party didn’t know where he was either.
Jon Krakauer awoke before dawn on the first day of 2005 and a short time later was strapped into the passenger seat of Jimmy Doyle’s small airplane, flying out to the Texas site. As they approached, they saw activity down below at the ranch, but they were too high to make out details. As Doyle swooped the plane down for a closer look, Krakauer grabbed his camera and began snapping pictures.
On the ground, panic ensued. People scattered, jumping into cars or heading for the tree line. A large black Suburban sped off. In moments, the place was clear, except for the big foundation footings that had drawn our attention in the first place.
Later that same day, Jon downloaded the images onto his computer and studied the details. We had guessed right; the FLDS had picked a major holiday on which to dedicate the new foundation, betting that no curious outsiders would be around. They had gathered in a prayer circle, and in clear view, standing right in the middle, was a long, lanky figure: Warren Jeffs. It was Warren who had piled into the SUV at the approach of the aircraft. He later expressed his displeasure at being caught in the middle of the prayer circle and blamed the interruption on workers who had not removed some concrete forms, and were thus responsible for delaying the dedication on the Lord’s scheduled time. Warren noted that he had intended to depart the site by 6:30 A.M. Jon had caught him by only a few minutes. Uncle Fred, wheezing and on oxygen, was also there.
It was a great way to start 2005. This was the first Warren sighting in many months, and it meant that he had not fled to Canada or Mexico as rumored. He was around, close enough to participate in activities at the compound. FLDS ranch spokesman Merril Jessop had been lying when he had said that Warren never went there. In fact, according to the journal, once the plane had departed and the morning sky was again safe, Jeffs and his followers returned to the site and finished blessing the foundation before he sped off on his next road trip.
CHAPTER 23
Wicked
Heavy framework started going up at the Texas temple site a few days after the hide-and-seek dedication ceremony. Only then did I start to get a feel for the size of the new building. As temple workers laid sheets of plywood for the first floor, I began making estimates of the size of the structure. It was going to be at least 17,000 square feet on each of three floors, and they were sparing no expense on the quality of building materials. Millions of dollars worth of mining, rock cutting, and construction equipment was brought in to extract the low-grade limestone from the ground.
Under Warren’s alternating whips of blessing and condemnation, construction went with lightning speed. Nobody can build faster than a troop of motivated FLDS builders who are convinced they are working for their very lives and the prophet.
Jeffs’s journal would show that he constantly babbled directions: precise dimensions for a thirty-foot-tall tapered tower to go atop the three-story building, double insulation in the walls, darkly tinted windows. He had a mental vision for every inch of the building. But Warren was not one of those sweat-stained kids that the FLDS consigned to learn the building trades instead of going to school. He had none of their construction skills, nor did he possess the necessary architectural training. His design plan came through his fevered revelations, which meant some of it was impossible to carry out. That did not stop him from giving orders.
When some irregularly shaped walls that he had dreamed up did not turn out as envisioned, he ordered Rulon Barlow, who was in charge of the framing, to double his crew and make it right.
Barlow, an experienced hand, explained that they were in the middle of putting up windows, but Warren again firmly ordered him to fix the walls instead. “I started helping them, carrying the sheeting that covers the outside of the wall,” Jeffs would recall. He wanted to see to it that the job would get done.