Prophet's Prey

by Sam Brower

  The judge was unable to clear away the blizzard of defense motions and make his final ruling until five months later, on May 28, 2007. By then, Warren was a physical and emotional mess. Although he wore a neat dark suit, white shirt, and white tie, he was so gaunt that the shirt collar hung loose around his scarecrow neck. During the proceedings, he would sometimes nod off, drooling to the point that his shirt grew wet.

  His condition had been a problem for the prosecution. They wanted to make sure Jeffs was capable of participating in his own defense. To maintain his delicate mental balance, the jailers had pampered him.

  He was allowed nearly unlimited telephone access and a constant stream of visitors. He participated in long-distance worship services, led teachings from a pay phone, and wrote new revelations and letters to be passed along to his followers. He assigned code numbers to specific individuals in the church hierarchy because he knew his conversations were being monitored and recorded while in custody. He was still building Zion from his jail cell and was still able to keep a tight rein on his followers. They firmly clung to the idea that the government was persecuting the prophet and church only because of their “unpopular religious beliefs.” In this, they were immovable.

  Warren was still captain of their ship, steering them all to salvation in the hereafter. Jeffs made every effort to conduct business as usual, and he almost succeeded—almost, but not quite. He was out of his element and missed the comforts and pampering he enjoyed as the FLDS monarch.

  The jail’s medical staff made a point of dropping by just to talk to him, and he was allowed a special diet to help to stave off his weight loss. A regimen of medication was prescribed to treat his depression and stabilize him, but he usually would not take it, saying the government was trying to poison him.

  He had some disturbing revelations during the Lord’s visits at night. Among his dreams was the sad prediction that his Naomi, who he referred to by the code name 91, was about to die. Warren dispatched orders to prepare her funeral arrangements, designated who would speak, and indicated where she should be buried. He spent hours in his cell communing with the Heavens concerning Naomi’s mission in the hereafter. It would have been a stunning illustration of his prophetic powers, except that it was all just another manifestation of his psychosis. Warren spent a long week mourning his loss before learning that Naomi remained alive and well.

  At the conclusion of the hearing, after finally binding the prophet over for trial, Judge Shumate was taking care of a few housekeeping legal matters and getting ready to recess. Suddenly, Warren stood at the defense table and said, “May I approach the bench, Your Honor? I just need to take care of one matter.” Awkwardly scrawling on a white tablet, he stood to speak and was fumbling to tear off a piece of paper to present to the court.

  The judge glanced up, surprised, and immediately denied the request, instructing Jeffs to take up whatever it was with his lawyers. To allow the prisoner to start talking directly to the court and not through his attorneys risked jeopardizing the entire process. Shumate scowled at the defense lawyers, who closed in around their client to see what he was talking about.

  “I just have this one matter, it will only take a minute, Your Honor,” Warren sputtered, gesturing with the sheet of paper. “This will just take a minute.” At that instant, a news photographer snapped his shutter.

  Shumate barked, “Court is recessed!” and almost bolted from his own courtroom while the lawyers scrambled to take away the paper and keep their client under control.

  The picture was distributed to the media, but it gave no clue as to what Warren wanted to talk about. Photography is an important part of my work and I wondered if there might be some way to digitally discover what was on the other side of that paper. I obtained a good copy and got busy with my computer, enhancing and enlarging. Whatever Warren had written became faintly visible on the back of the sheet. Of course, the writing appeared backward in the snapshot, so I made a mirror image, then zoomed in. As I sharpened it and filled in the pixels, some of the words became clear.

  He had written, in part, “I have not been a prophet and am not the prophet.” He had intended to announce to the court that he was not the prophet of the FLDS after all.

  Ben Winslow, a reporter with the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, had called while I was working on the image and I gave him the information. Ben jumped on it, enlisting the help of a photography lab and a handwriting expert. Winslow’s story, headlined I AM NOT THE PROPHET, spread to the national media.

  Judge Shumate had not allowed Jeffs to make his statement in court, but outside the courtroom no one could shut Warren up, and he was intent on delivering the message, even revealing it to the deputies who were escorting him out of the courthouse. He would make the same confession to several FLDS leaders and family members, recorded on the jail’s pay phone, admitting that he had never been God’s messenger and he knew that because, of course, God had told him so. While his followers believed everything else he said, this was more than they could bear to accept. The entire episode became comical as Warren tried to convince his people that he was a fraud and a liar, saying, “the truth is not in me.” Even after confessing to his mother and several church leaders that he had “immoral relations with a sister and a daughter,” nobody would listen. He had conditioned them so completely that not even he could reverse the brainwashing.

  One regular visitor to the jail was Warren’s brother Nephi, and the scene of Warren admitting to him once again that he was not, and never had been, the prophet was caught on the jail’s surveillance tape. Nephi disagreed, insisting just as strongly that Warren was the prophet and this was only another of the Lord’s tests. “Just a minute,” Warren replied, as a blank stare settled over his countenance. He momentarily looked away from his brother, apparently receiving a strong and clear voice that no one else could hear. “This is a message from God,” he insisted, still listening to the communication from on high. “THIS-IS-NOT-A-TEST!”

  As sad as it was, I broke out laughing while watching the pitiful scene on video. When the jailer took Warren from the visiting room, the shocked Nephi remained motionless for several minutes, his hands over his face, weeping.

  Despite being locked up, Warren was still able to manage the affairs of the church. According to his records he was able to smuggle out documents and communications which skirted jail security including a detailed schematic of Warren’s jail cell, and its location inside the Purgatory facility. There also were detailed instructions to his counselors, directions to kick some FLDS members out of their homes, move some others to places of refuge, and assign routine household chores to various wives. Warren, at least for a little while, was back in form.

  I got the chance to see the prophet in person when I accompanied attorneys Roger and Greg Hoole to a deposition in May 2007, at Purgatory. It involved a new client named Wendell Musser, who Warren had kicked out and was determined to prevent from visiting his own infant son.

  Musser had been ordered by Warren to be the caretaker for several of the prophet’s wives at a hideout near Florence, Colorado, while the prophet was on the run. When Musser was arrested for driving under the influence on his way back to the safe house one evening, Warren was furious. The incident might have tipped off the police to the refuge location where his wives were hidden. Wendell was told to go away and repent from a distance, which he did. After a couple weeks the separation from his family became unbearable and he tried to return to see his wife and son, only to find the house had been abandoned and his wife and child gone. Warren had assigned them to another man. Wendell was beside himself, broke with the prophet, and started legal proceedings to at least get legal visitation rights with his son. Musser turned out to be a world of information on the inner workings of some of the FLDS hierarchy.

  The day of our visit, the prophet was extremely gaunt and the green-and-white striped jail uniform hung on him. Beneath the short-sleeved pullover, he wore thermal long johns with long sleeves, des
pite the fact that it was midsummer. He had made a point of showing his followers that he was sticking to the religious mandate of covering his flesh. The shorts and T-shirt in which he was photographed when arrested were explained away as having been a necessary evil to blend into the gentile world.

  He knew exactly who I was, and he gave a polite “How are you?” when we were introduced. I was pleased that he was looking better than the last time I had seen him in the courtroom. Richard Wright, Warren’s Nevada attorney, was present and on the advice of counsel Warren exercised his right not to answer Roger and Greg’s questions for fear he might incriminate himself. He refused to answer even the most benign and elementary of questions.

  After about thirty minutes of listening to Warren plead the fifth, we decided to leave. As I stood up, Warren unexpectedly thrust his hand out to me, and without thinking, I automatically took it. I immediately felt that I had made a terrible mistake. I had no desire to shake hands with someone that I knew to be the perpetrator of such heinous crimes against children. I had lost sleep over the brutality that Warren had inflicted on children and on his own people, and felt that the custom might intimate some sort of tolerance for his atrocities. I would rather have kept things on a strictly formal basis, minus the handshake. At least I did not get the treatment that my buddy Gary Engels got when he first met Warren. The prophet had surprised Gary, too, by telling Engels that he forgave Gary for persecuting him. Jeffs didn’t lay a surprise blessing on me, but as I left the jail, I felt the overwhelming need to wash my hands.

  The prophet was aware that we intended to report his noncooperation to the judge and that we would seek a contempt of court order, but that wasn’t much motivation for someone who was already in jail to answer our questions.

  But I had an idea for another way to apply pressure. I dug around and found out that Warren’s commissary account was kept filled with the maximum amount of money allowed by jail regulations. So we devised a motion for the court to seize that money, and any other assets we could find, for as long as Warren refused to speak to us, and earmark those funds to cover my investigative fees for locating Wendell’s family.

  Minutes before the commissary account was to be seized, our client’s wife and son suddenly showed up at his front door, and Wendell Musser was able to obtain a legal order providing for visitation with the boy. The prophet gave in rather than surrender his ability to buy his jail goodies. The small victories were adding up, and it seemed to make up for the handshake.

  CHAPTER 31

  Elissa

  A long year passed between the preliminary hearing and the trial of Warren Jeffs in Utah for the two felony charges of rape as an accomplice, but much was happening. The FLDS and its prophet had never before been taken to the mat as they had been over the past few years, and part of my job was to continue staying a jump ahead of them.

  During that stretch, we finished our work on the Lost Boys and the Brent Jeffs civil suits. They were won by default because the prophet refused to appear in court. We may have won, but our clients did not want to be put in the position of collecting monetary damages from their own families. They chose instead to make a public statement that their goal was to effect change within the community by bringing to light the rampant child abuse hidden in the shadows. Each client received a token piece of property in Short Creek. A trust fund to help other displaced children remains a future possibility.

  One unexpected result of our lawsuits against Warren and the FLDS church led to a parting of the ways between Jeffs and his longtime Salt Lake City attorney Rodney R. Parker. The sandy-haired lawyer tried to convince Jeffs that he could lose everything if he didn’t step up and defend it. Warren fired him, answered them nothing, and lost.

  Jury selection for the Jeffs trial began on September 7, 2007, and part of my job was to keep Elissa Wall beyond the reach of the FLDS and the media, getting her safely to and from the courtroom. That proved to be a logistical nightmare because the media was stacked up everywhere and I believed the FLDS loyalists hated her enough to endanger her safety.

  Chief enforcer Willie Jessop or his buddies would park right in the open directly in front of the glass-fronted entranceway to the building in which Brock Belnap, the Washington County prosecutor, had his office, and just sit there peering in. The silent message: We are watching.

  So we made careful arrangements with the court, its staff, the bailiff, and the police to maneuver the witness from the secret location where she was staying to the courthouse, which was in the middle of a cordoned-off two-square-block area. Timing had to be precise, for Warren Jeffs also would be moved through the building, and the court wanted no chance encounters. For help, I once again enlisted Jon Krakauer, who had become a good friend that I could trust to move quickly and wisely if things got tight.

  The trial began a week later, on September 13, and after Jon and I navigated Elissa through the media madhouse, she took her place in the second row between Roger Hoole and her husband, Lamont. I went to my assigned aisle seat two rows behind her. Reporters filled most of the other seats, but a group of FLDS loyalists sat nearby to support their prophet, glaring at Elissa.

  The opening statements were crucial, and Belnap focused the scope of the trial for the jury; it had nothing to do with religion, nor with polygamy. He said the state would prove that the defendant, Warren Jeffs, was an accomplice in the incestuous rape of a fourteen-year-old minor child. The trial was about that, and only that.

  Making the defense argument was another member of the FLDS legal team, the impeccably coiffed and dressed Tara Isaacson. She insinuated that “no rape [had] occurred” at all, that any sex that took place had been consensual, and that Elissa had initiated contact. I have been through many trials involving sexual abuse, and the defense almost always launches a rabid attack upon the victim. That strategy would be followed precisely in this trial.

  One reason the defense chose Isaacson is that they clearly wanted another female to grill Elissa about intimate details. Isaacson’s entire presentation had been carefully built into a computerized PowerPoint presentation that would lead the jury through the events, but when the computer malfunctioned, Isaacson was left stumbling for words without the video guide. She bored in as coldly as possible but did not do a very good job at presenting her argument off the cuff.

  Elissa had been nervous on the drive into court that morning, fussing with her long hair, but once she took the witness stand, she settled in quickly as Craig Barlow from the Utah attorney general’s office led her through her testimony. I watched the jurors carefully as they were introduced to the grim life of a girl inside the FLDS. They sat stone-faced as she described the total lack of sex education, the way girls and boys were taught to treat the opposite gender as they would treat snakes, and how a girl would be assigned by the prophet to an older man she might not even know.

  As we drove home that evening, she wanted to know if she had done all right, how I thought the jury was reacting, and she worried about the upcoming defense cross-examination. She was expressing normal insecurities, and I gave her comforting words, but I had been unable to read anything into the day. I had learned over the years that the best policy was to be positive, but noncommittal.

  That night, we parked Krakauer’s car, with a bicycle lashed to the top, inside the sally port at the courthouse and left it there. Then we made sure that everyone saw Elissa arrive for the second day of trial in the pickup truck.

  Willie Jessop was up to his old antics, treating the court process as some kind of game and attempting to intimidate our witness. He tried to rearrange the assigned seating in the courtroom so that he could sit directly in Elissa’s line of sight during her testimony, and behind her in the courtroom. It was the same intimidation tactic the FLDS had pulled in Arizona during the Candi Shapley testimony. This time, a savvy bailiff picked up on what was happening and gave Willie a warning, which he ignored. The bailiff informed the judge, and two deputies removed Jessop from the courthouse. He
was barred for the remainder of the trial.

  Elissa testified that day about the impossibility of her leaving Short Creek rather than obey the prophet. She was only fourteen at the time, was not old enough to drive, had no money, and lived in an FLDS community, completely dependent upon the family to which her mother had been reassigned after her father had been kicked out of the church and banished. “I had no options,” she declared. I believed her, and I thought the jury did, too.

  Her description of the sham marriage ritual performed by Warren Jeffs at the Caliente motel in Nevada and the eventual rape by Allen Steed was harrowing. In a tearful voice, she told the spellbound court that when Allen, her nineteen-year-old cousin, began to undress her, she begged, “I can’t do this, please don’t. I was sobbing. My whole entire body was shaking I was so scared. He didn’t stop. He just laid me onto the bed and had sex.”

  The defense took its turn after the lunch break in court, and Tara Isaacson spent the afternoon lashing Elissa with sharp questions designed to make the witness look like a vengeful adult woman at the time of her wedding instead of a brainwashed underage child who was forced into an illegal sexual arrangement, and into having sex against her will. Elissa had plenty of options, Isaacson declared, but chose not to use them. I thought that was a ridiculous argument, since a fourteen-year-old cannot legally consent to sex in any situation. Left unsaid was that Elissa’s entire life up until that point had been one of those “keep sweet” journeys that had intentionally limited her choices.

  When it was time to leave at the end of the day, we had a woman member of our team slip into the pickup truck that we had used to come to court in the morning to serve as a decoy for the media and the FLDS. Right behind the pickup, Jon and Elissa calmly drove off in the opposite direction in Jon’s waiting car with the bike attached, totally ignored. I was right on their bumper to make sure we were not followed.