by Sam Brower
Her tale could have been an FLDS primer. Candi grew up in a twenty-bedroom, sixteen-bathroom home with her father, his six wives, and most of her fifty-six siblings. She was taught to keep sweet and prepare to be a good wife and bring children of her own upon the earth.
Her trouble began when one of her sisters turned seventeen and told their father she was ready to be “turned in,” the term for being placed with some worthy priesthood holder as a wife. Her father gave his approval and an appointment was made for the girl to be interviewed by the prophet, who would choose a suitable candidate. Candi, who had just turned sixteen, went along to keep her sister company. Warren took it upon himself to add Candi to the list of brides-in-waiting.
Soon, her father happily informed Candi that she would be married the very next day. He did not know anything about the groom other than that he was a member of the large Barlow clan. Candi’s life was catapulted in an instant from her comfortable day-to-day routine into a supersonic ride into the unknown. She had not seen this coming, and she was scared.
Another friend and valuable resource would later fill in for me what happened next. Carolyn Jessop, who eventually left the cult and ripped the lid off many FLDS secrets with her bestselling book Escape, was managing the Caliente Hot Springs Motel in Nevada at the time. Her husband, the powerful FLDS functionary Merril Jessop, owned the motel on State Road 93, and it had become a favored hideout in which Warren Jeffs would perform multiple marriage ceremonies. Secrecy was paramount. No matter the age of the bride-to-be, crossing interstate boundaries for illegal sexual purposes is a serious crime covered by the federal Mann Act. Some underage brides were transported down from Canada, making it an international crime as well.
The routine Carolyn described was very cloak-and-daggerish. The day or night before a set of marriages was to take place, she would receive a call to set aside a number of rooms, and the reservation would be confirmed the following day. The tipoff for Carolyn was if Room 15 was among those to be reserved. Room 15 was a boxy little bungalow that sat alone near the office and was the place where the marriages were always performed.
Each designated new bride would be assigned one of the other rooms and would stay inside with her family until it was her turn. Her groom, the priesthood holder, might wait outside in his truck. Then both would be summoned to Room 15, which was decorated in pink, and the ceremony would be quickly conducted. The new couple would then usually drive off to their new lives while another couple would be called in for the next arranged marriage. Room 15 was a wedding assembly line for underage girls.
That was exactly what faced the bewildered sixteen-year-old Candi Shapley. Candi told us that she was taken to Room 15 and stood beside Randy Barlow and Randy’s first wife, Valene, and his mother. Randy was twenty-eight-years old and had children by Valene, and although Candi had seen him around Short Creek, they had never spoken. Warren Jeffs performed the ceremony as Uncle Rulon Jeffs watched, and afterward Uncle Rulon croaked out a blessing.
I leaned back in my chair and quietly exhaled as she spoke, glancing over at Gary. This was huge. We were talking to someone who could personally testify that the prophet had married her off, knowing she was sixteen, to a man twelve years her senior. The fact that she had been shuttled to another state to avoid detection verified that a crime had probably been committed.
Candi said that as they drove away from Caliente Hot Springs, she was apprehensive and confused. She did not even understand why she had had to travel all the way to Nevada just to get married although her father had told her there was a law against plural marriage in their home state of Utah. The real reason was that the Caliente motel marriage factory drew no attention from outsiders, there were controls on who would attend, and it was a safe hideaway for the secretive prophet; Short Creek was too public. Her only comfort was that her father had also promised her she had the right to say no if she did not want to have sex with her new husband. Candi resisted for as long as she could because anything to do with sex was entirely foreign to her, and when Randy finally made his move, she refused.
The spurned husband bided his time and even met with Warren to complain that his young bride did not want to have children yet. The prophet instructed her husband to find a way. The next time, when she again resisted, she said Randy pinned her down and raped her. Later, she claimed he raped her again. Taking her problem to Warren did not help. The prophet told her the way to make things better was to become more obedient and have children. Feeling helpless, she submitted, but things only got worse. She would confide to me later that Randy was a brute who treated her like a slave and forced her to engage in group sex with him and another woman.
By the time we left the initial meeting with Candi, we could see potential criminal charges all over the place, as well as a possible witness in our civil racketeering case. Candi’s testimony could send both Warren Jeffs and Randy Barlow to prison. In this case, the wedding was a sham not only because Candi was underage and Randy was already married, but also because Warren, who performed the sexual arrangement, had no lawful authority to marry anyone.
To be a witness in a sexual abuse case is difficult, and it takes a very brave woman to carry through to the end. But I headed home to Cedar City feeling optimistic. I liked Candi. Maybe we finally had found someone ready to take it all the way. Maybe not. I rated it fifty-fifty at best.
Fred Jessop, the genial Uncle Fred, had been missing for more than a year, ever since Warren had stripped away his position as bishop of Short Creek and forced him into hiding. At the age of ninety-three and in failing health, Fred had disappeared in the middle of the night, and he was said to have been sent on a special mission.
Information about what had happened was sparse. People who had been at the house the night Fred was shuttled off told me that a crew had been assigned to remove his belongings. Things he could use the most, such as clothes, were left behind, while items of value that he had amassed over his long lifetime disappeared. Will Timpson, the new bishop, moved into the house the day after Fred disappeared.
There are a lot of Jessops around, and the family tree is so strange that I did not find it unusual when I accompanied Joe C. Jessop Jr., who was the combination son, grandson, and nephew of Uncle Fred, to the Washington County sheriff’s office in the spring of 2005 so that he could file a report placing the former bishop into the National Criminal Identification Center’s computerized federal database as a missing person. Other family members who were no longer in the FLDS were worried about him and feared he would not last long without appropriate medical care.
Uncle Fred, who had personally known five of the nine prophets, was very sick, totally dependent on others, and cowed in his old age by Warren. He had been turned into a perfect yes man, the ultimate loyalist, as his health failed.
“Uncle Warren is an Enoch. He is a Moses!” Fred had praised in a sermon. “He told us once he knew what Noah went through. He is a revelator like the Prophet Joseph, a colonizer like Brigham Young, one who lives in hiding like John Taylor … All of those Prophets are centered in Uncle Warren now.” That was about the highest endorsement anyone could give. As the months passed, Fred slipped so completely off our radar that I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Very few people did.
Warren took a personal interest in the care of the ailing Uncle Fred, who was suffering from heart and kidney problems, was diabetic, and needed an oxygen tank to breathe. He insisted Fred’s ladies were to give him only special bottled water, yarrow tea, and garlic drinks. Such instructions made it unclear to me whether Warren’s intentions were meant to help or hurt the ailing old man.
In early March 2005, hidden away in Texas by Warren, Fred’s health took a turn for the worse. Two wives who were nursing him alerted the leadership, but instead of being immediately moved into a hospital, the frail old counselor was ordered to be driven to another hideaway in distant Albuquerque, New Mexico, about nine grueling hours by car. The paranoid prophet wouldn’t take the chance of t
hat illness leading authorities back to Zion and ultimately to himself. According to Warren’s journal an FLDS doctor secured some medicine from prescriptions he wrote for people in Short Creek, and he was assigned the task of escorting Fred, along with two other couriers, on the cross-country journey that would surely end in the old man’s death.
Once they were settled in New Mexico, another wife pleaded that he be taken to a hospital immediately, and she was scolded for her lack of faith and for assuming to know more than the prophet, who was back in Texas, praying and ordering them to sit tight and wait to see whether Fred improved.
Fred’s inability to get medical attention was not unusual within the FLDS. It was never easy to get permission to go to a hospital, where a vulnerable patient would face questioning authorities and might inadvertently expose some sort of illegal activity back home. Permission had to come directly from Warren.
But Fred was not the only thing on Warren’s plate. Fresh off their eastern swing, he told Naomi that he was feeling the call to go to some foreign country and wanted maps of England, France, and Germany.
While Fred was languishing in Albuquerque, Warren received another revelation and the old man was put on the road again, transported farther north, into Colorado, once again depriving the dying old man of much-needed medical attention. As the little convoy of two vehicles neared Denver, it seemed as if the venerable old church legend might die right there in the car. Permission finally was given to hospitalize him at the Sky Ridge Medical Center, about twenty miles from downtown Denver. He was placed in the intensive care unit, and the church’s doctor, Lloyd Barlow, reported back to Warren periodically. (Lloyd Barlow was later indicted in Texas for failure to report child abuse.) The hospital staff was warned that Fred’s only chance for survival was to have a stent surgically placed to stabilize his heart and then undergo arthroscopic surgery to repair a valve. About that time, Warren had another vision, which often happened when he needed to justify his actions. This one showed Uncle Fred getting into a car and going away to visit his family, but leaving Warren behind. The prophet was left with the impression that once Fred died and was on the other side of the veil, their work could continue faster than before. He instructed the doctors to make Fred as comfortable as possible but to take no other medical actions.
Warren decided to travel up from Texas to see Fred. At the hospital, he stood beside the dying man, who had a respirator down his throat. The doctors gave no hope without the surgery, which would have been performed at still another hospital and was dangerous in any case for a patient in such poor health and at such an advanced age. Warren decided that his vision about the car was a sign from God to let Fred go. He coldly did not express any remorse for making the stricken man, who had been a loyal friend and follower for many years, travel hundreds of miles before allowing him to receive medical care.
Once Uncle Fred passed away, the journal showed that Warren left in a hurry, because the Lord had shown him that if he stayed in Denver, he “would be accused of killing the old man” and that “as soon as [the] word [got] out, [he would] have the news media and also [his] enemies trying to trace the family.”
Next came the charade of a funeral. Fred had served his terrestrial usefulness to Warren, but he could continue to be a means of validating Warren’s power. Will Timpson, now Will Jessop, who had replaced Fred as the bishop, lied to hospital administrators by saying that he was Fred’s actual son and had authority to take possession of the body. He was allowed to haul the corpse away in the rear of an SUV to a hidden location. Colorado authorities considered filing criminal charges for illegally taking possession of a dead body and falsifying records, but they eventually gave up when jurisdictional problems cropped up because the Utah border had been crossed. Warren held some private moments with some of Fred’s family at a secret hideaway, where he also decided details of the funeral and burial details to take place in Short Creek.
The outlaw prophet then returned to the safety of Texas until the night before the funeral, when he jumped over to New Mexico; and a day later he and First Counselor Wendell Nielsen checked into an Albuquerque motel, which was as close as they would come to the funeral of their dear friend and Second Counselor Frederick Meade Jessop in Short Creek. They did not show up personally, nor did the program contain their names.
Even before the services started, the paranoid weirdness of the FLDS was on full display.
The central hall at the LeRoy S. Johnson Meeting House overflowed with the faithful on the balmy afternoon of Sunday, March 20, 2005. Technicians rigged transmissions to side rooms, to Albuquerque, into private homes, to Mancos, to the ranch in Texas, and all the way to Canada.
Apostates who had known Uncle Fred for many years filtered up to the meeting house, but the bullies were ready. MacRae Oler, a cocky young Canadian, was at the door to point out familiar faces from north of the Forty-ninth Parallel, and those visitors were physically denied entrance. Big Willie Jessop wrenched the arm of one of Fred’s relatives behind his back and shoved him out the door. Chief Marshal Sam Roundy blocked others in what Winston Blackmore later derisively described as special “keep sweet” moments.
After the song “Dear Uncle Fred We Love you,” Wendell Nielsen came on the speakerphone hookup and delivered an eleven-minute tribute from the motel in New Mexico. Then, like the voice of a disembodied god, the unmistakable drone of Warren Jeffs drifted in. For the first time in more than a year, his Short Creek followers were hearing his actual voice and not a recording. He spoke for thirty minutes.
In months to come, Jeffs would invoke the memory of the popular Uncle Fred to strengthen his hold, although his power was already complete. He was finally rid of the last real threat to his authority. Warren later would appoint an even stronger henchman, Merril Jessop, to fill the vacancy left by the departed Uncle Fred in the First Presidency. Adding up the tally later, it seems that the price Merril paid to become so influential was the placement of at least eleven daughters and two granddaughters, some of whom were only underage children, to join Warren’s long list of “heavenly comfort wives.”
The only other truly important position in the FLDS church was that of patriarch, to which Warren had appointed one of his own brothers, Leroy Jeffs. Warren began looking at him with suspicion.
CHAPTER 25
Twelve Years Old
Although Warren Jeffs had finally allowed Steven Chatwin and his family to escape from the battleground home of his apostate brother, Ross Chatwin, I suspected that the church still wasn’t ready to give in.
Ross had the building, but the court had said nothing about the utilities that served it, and the FLDS was always alert for an opening. The utilities were cut off, an intentionally cruel move since it was still bitterly cold in Short Creek. He had been heating the lower floor with a propane gas burner, but when Ross went to the city to change the water, gas, and electricity for the upper floor into his own name in March 2005, he was refused.
The Chatwins went without utilities for nearly a month before the Hildale City Council agreed to take up the matter in an emergency session. I drove down for the meeting and listened as Ross made a reasoned plea before the council members, all of whom were prominent FLDS members who detested him. I scribbled my name on a list of speakers to comment.
I was not happy to hear them belittle Ross and his family as “squatters” on church land. They spoke in a self-righteous tone, even as they were depriving a couple with six young children of water, heat, and electricity in harsh weather. The council’s hypocrisy was highlighted when the cell phone of Richard Allred, the Colorado City mayor, suddenly chirped out its custom ring tone, the familiar Mormon hymn “Love At Home.” When my turn came to speak, I let them have it, lecturing them about religious persecution, civil rights violations, and the law.
Chief Marshal Roundy, one of his deputies, and the ever-present enforcer Willie Jessop were staring daggers and closed in on me, but I ignored them, stood my ground, and said my piece.
The council’s rubber-stamp decision on behalf of the church was never in doubt. They voted unanimously to deny the utility hookups, just as Warren instructed.
The situation was tense. As I left, the three goons were huddled together on the sidewalk in front of the council chambers, bragging about how they were going to “take me down.” Big Willie followed me out to the parking area and gave me his best death glare as I got into my car. He reminded me of a playground bully who had suddenly come face-to-face with someone who wasn’t afraid of him. His juvenile tactics usually worked with the church members he was assigned to strong-arm but seemed comical to me.
I decided that there was still one more thing that I could try to do to help the Chatwins with their problem. Later that day I telephoned every media contact I had, and the reporters deluged the city offices and Mayor David Zitting with questions about why the church had terminated the needed city-run services to a desperate family of eight in their own home. With the court order in place, outside law enforcement agencies becoming curious, and the media breathing down his neck, Warren decided not to continue that particular fight. The utilities were turned back on before sunset.